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Abstract(s)
Water losses have economical, technical, social and environmental negative impacts and so water companies are always willing to reduce them. The IWA Water Loss Task Force identified four main control strategies to reduce real losses: 1) infrastructure management; 2) pressure management; 3) active leakage control; and 4) speed and quality of repairs. Unreported leaks and background leakage usually represent a major component of water losses and pressure management is an effective, easy, economic and quick solution to reduce it. Pressure management can be implemented by introducing Pressure Reduction Valves (PRVs): fixed-outlet; time-modulated; flow-modulated and pressure modulated. For a fixed-outlet PRV there is a single working condition (pressure downstream of the PRV is always the same). For a time-modulated PRV there can be several working conditions (for instance, a lower pressure during the night period - from 0 to 6 am, and higher one during the remainder of the day). The flow-modulated and pressure modulated PRVs are more efficient because they constantly try to adjust the working conditions to reach the minimum pressure required at the critical node. However, pressure management projects must be preceded by specialized studies (identify the optimal location and settings of the PRVs to install) and cost benefit analysis (assessment of economic viability). A previous work presented a methodology to help in those tasks, by identifying the optimal location and setting of fixed-outlet PRVs to reduce water losses in WDNs and maximize the NPV of pressure management projects. Now the methodology was extended to include also time modulated PRVs and this paper presents the results obtained for a hypothetical case study.
Description
Keywords
Pressure management Simulated Annealing Water distribution network Water losses