Rehabilitation and Leakage Reduction on C-Town Using Hydraulic Criteria

Abstract

This paper presents a methodology to rehabilitate and manage leakages on the C-Town water distribution system. A hydraulic model with emitters was considered to represent pipe leakages as concentrated flows in the nodes. The proposed methodology introduces two hydraulic concepts: the unit headloss to rehabilitate the network and the flow-pressure criterion to determine the location of valves; in addition, it uses genetic algorithms for pump optimization processes. This approach aimed to apply a pressure management scheme consisting in the allocation of valves to reduce both energy and leakage costs. The final result shows that all the requirements of the problem were satisfied with little computational effort, as expected, using hydraulic-based processes and criteria, compared to a formal heuristic approach. The introduced concepts allowed constructive and operational cost minimization. In relation to the leakage reduction, the use of emitters did not represent well pipe losses in the sense that pressure reduction strategies were not effective for this particular problem, limiting the leakage cost reduction. However, those strategies have shown good performance in other network analyses.