Performance study of water distribution systems based on flow paths accumulation

Abstract EN

Water distribution networks are conventionally designed to satisfy required water demands and prescribed pressures at consumption points conditioned on that all network components are being in service.

However, a network component could be unavailable for a certain period due to several reasons.

A sudden increase in pressure or heavy traffic loading could result in pipe burst or, at least, leakage at pipe joints, which in turn makes some consumers suffer a shortage of water supply until the pipe is either repaired or replaced.

As such, the current trend of water network design approaches aims to produce designs capable of operating under both normal and failure conditions.

The fact that the accurate simulation of all possible failures, even for a small network, is a time-consuming and an impractical process makes it essential to establish alternative measures for assessing failure conditions in an uncomplicated manner.

Among the established measures, the network entropy has been found to be strongly correlated with accurate measures.

However, the evaluation of network entropy involves deploying iterative methods for solving non-linear equations for multiple source networks.

In this study, a new and simple to calculate measure is suggested.

The new measure is based on the accumulation of pipe flow directions only and does not require solving hydraulic equations and any further non-linear equations.

The results are encouraging when applying the suggested measure to benchmark network in literature.