WEUSEDTO—Water End USE Dataset and TOols: An open water end use consumption dataset and data analytics tools

Globalization, climate changes, innovative technologies and new human habits have increased atten- tion to water conservation and management. Therefore, behavioural studies became a key element to understand how and when water is used in residential environment. Water End USE Dataset and TOols (WEUSEDTO), an open water end use consumption dataset and data analytics tools, has been released to help researchers, water utilities and companies to test models and algorithms on real water consumption data. The dataset combines with some notebook python able to analyse high-resolution water data (data recorded with 1 sample per second) to provide several tools to manage raw data, compute statistical analysis, learn fixture usage and generate synthetic simulation models. In addition, washbasin flow data were used as a test case to illustrate the main features of WEUSEDTO: providing volume and duration of single events, classifying usages and simulating user’s behaviour

Criteria, objectives and methodologies for water network partitioning

Water distribution networks are complex infrastructures characterized by very large dimensions (meshed networks with thousands of nodes) and reduced accessibility (generally they are buried underground). These peculiarities make it particularly difficult to manage and show numerous criticalities; at the same time, water distribution networks represent one of the main subsystems of smart cities. The paradigm “divide et impera” is a valid technique to improve the management and facilitate the maintenance, the water balance estimation, the water leakage detection and the pressures control. On this side, Water network District Metering (WDM), a method developed in England, and already implemented in many countries, represents a modern technique to organize urban water systems, offering new perspectives for design, management and maintenance. The WDM is recommended as one of the best practice to limit the huge amount of dispersed water in urban networks, simplifying water leakage detection, carrying out pressure management, improving water system management and monitoring of district hydraulic data. On this subject, the authors developed a specific software (SWANP 3.0) for water network partitioning that integrates the main optimization algorithms. This paper shows the main aspects of water network partitioning summarizing the principal recently proposed techniques in the literature aimed to find the best partitioning layout from an economic and performance point of view

Overview of Energy Management and Leakage Control Systems for Smart Water Grids and Digital Water

Current and future smart cities are moving towards the zero-net energy use concept. To this end, the built environment should also be designed for efficient energy use and play a significant role in the production of such energy. At present, this is achieved by focusing on energy demand in buildings and to the renewable trade-off related to smart power grids. However, urban water distribution systems constantly carry an excess of hydraulic energy that can potentially be recovered to produce electricity. This paper presents a comprehensive review of current strategies for energy production by reviewing the state-of-the-art of smart water systems. New technologies (such as cyber-physical systems, digital twins, blockchain) and new methodologies (network dynamics, geometric deep learning) associated with digital water are also discussed. The paper then focuses on modelling the installation of both micro-turbines and pumps as turbines, instead of/together with pressure reduction valves, to further demonstrate the energy-recovery methods which will enable water network partitioning into district metered areas. The associated benefits on leakage control, as a source of energy, and for contributing to overall network resilience are also highlighted. The paper concludes by presenting future research directions. Notably, digital water is proposed as the main research and operational direction for current and future Water Distribution Systems (WDS) and as a holistic, data-centred framework for the operation and management of water networks.</jats:p

Applications of Graph Spectral Techniques to Water Distribution Network Management

Cities depend on multiple heterogeneous, interconnected infrastructures to provide safe water to consumers. Given this complexity, efficient numerical techniques are needed to support optimal control and management of a water distribution network (WDN). This paper introduces a holistic analysis framework to support water utilities on the decision making process for an efficient supply management. The proposal is based on graph spectral techniques that take advantage of eigenvalues and eigenvectors properties of matrices that are associated with graphs. Instances of these matrices are the adjacency matrix and the Laplacian, among others. The interest for this application is to work on a graph that specifically represents a WDN. This is a complex network that is made by nodes corresponding to water sources and consumption points and links corresponding to pipes and valves. The aim is to face new challenges on urban water supply, ranging from computing approximations for network performance assessment to setting device positioning for efficient and automatic WDN division into district metered areas. It is consequently created a novel tool-set of graph spectral techniques adapted to improve main water management tasks and to simplify the identification of water losses through the definition of an optimal network partitioning. Two WDNs are used to analyze the proposed methodology. Firstly, the well-known network of C-Town is investigated for benchmarking of the proposed graph spectral framework. This allows for comparing the obtained results with others coming from previously proposed approaches in literature. The second case-study corresponds to an operational network. It shows the usefulness and optimality of the proposal to effectively manage a WDN. <br/

Optimal Sensor Placement in a Partitioned Water Distribution Network for the Water Protection from Contamination

Water network protection from accidental and intentional contamination is one of the most critical issues for preserving the citizen health. Recently, some techniques have been proposed in the literature to define the optimal sensor placement. On the other hand, through the definition of permanent DMAs (District Meter Areas), water network partitioning allows significant reduction in the number of exposed users through the full isolation of DMA. In this paper, the optimal sensor placement is coupled with water network partitioning in order to define the best location of isolation valves and control stations, to be closed and installed respectively. The proposed procedure is based on different procedures, and it was tested on a real water network, showing that it is possible both to mitigate the impact of a water contamination and simplify the sensor placement through the water network partitioning

Discontinuous permeable adsorptive barrier design and cost analysis: a methodological approach to optimisation

The following paper presents a method to optimise a discontinuous permeable adsorptive barrier (PAB-D). This method is based on the comparison of different PAB-D configurations obtained by changing some of the main PAB-D design parameters. In particular, the well diameters, the distance between two consecutive passive wells and the distance between two consecutive well lines were varied, and a cost analysis for each configuration was carried out in order to define the best performing and most cost-effective PAB-D configuration. As a case study, a benzene-contaminated aquifer located in an urban area in the north of Naples (Italy) was considered. The PAB-D configuration with a well diameter of 0.8 m resulted the best optimised layout in terms of performance and cost-effectiveness. Moreover, in order to identify the best configuration for the remediation of the aquifer studied, a comparison with a continuous permeable adsorptive barrier (PAB-C) was added. In particular, this showed a 40% reduction of the total remediation costs by using the optimised PAB-D

An innovative approach based on recursive clustering to design optimal districts in water distribution networks

Water Network Partitioning (WNP) in District Metered Areas (DMAs) is an effective management strategy for the Water Distribution Networks (WDNs), simplifying pressure control, water loss detection and protection from contamination. Nevertheless, the definition of permanent DMAs constitutes an arduous task, since, the closure of some pipes may worsen significantly the energy and the topological redundancy of the system. In recent years, several optimization procedures, relied on heuristic optimization methods, were focused on the optimal design of DMAs; they generally are based on the simultaneous insertion of gate valves in all boundary pipes defined in the clustering phase. Since these procedures are performed on the original network layout, they neglect the consequences of each pipe closure on the topology and the hydraulic performance of the network. They fail to face the optimization problem recursively since they find the optimal pipe closure at one time. This paper proposes a novel optimization procedure based on the recursive spectral clustering after each pipe closure combining, step by step, the clustering and the physical dividing phase. In this way, the optimal positioning of each next single gate valve is achieved on a novel cluster layout that takes into account the previous pipe closures. The proposed methodology is tested on a real WDN and is compared, with a non-recursive procedure, through some energy and topological performance indices

Optimal Design Of Network Partitioning For Water Distribution System Protection From Intentional Contamination

The intentional contamination of water distribution systems represents one of the major risks for citizens, consequently after 11th September 2001 many international organizations have been concerned about it. The availability at low cost of new monitoring and management devices, controlled by a remote system, allows to define different layouts of the water network in a new paradigm of dynamic layouts of water distribution systems in which an important role is played by water network partitioning and sectorization. Recently the advantages of these techniques have been investigated to analyse their application to the problem of water network protection from the contamination. The possibility of designing districts and sectors reduces the risk of affecting many people because several points of contaminant introduction would be needed to produce a wide negative impact on the network. Furthermore, the closure of the sectors, in which the contamination occurs, allows to protect significantly a part of the users. This way the water network partitioning respects the criteria of dual-use value because districts and sectors, in addition to protect the network from contamination, are essentially defined for other aims (water balance, pressure management, etc.) optimizing the costs. The design of the water network partitioning is essentially based only on the reduction of the negative effects on hydraulic performance due to the insertion of gate valves in the network, but not on the minimization of the negative effects of a possible contamination. In this study a novel methodology is proposed that allows to optimize the design of water network partitioning both for compliance of hydraulic performance and for water protection. The methodology is based on heuristic optimization techniques that optimize a costrained multiobjective fuction. The analysis was carried out with different contaminant and sectorization scenarios on a real multiple source water distribution network in Mexico

Pump-and-treat configurations with vertical and horizontal wells to remediate an aquifer contaminated by hexavalent chromium

Pump-and-treat technology is among the most used technologies for groundwater remediation. While conventional, vertical wells (VRWs) are well-known and used from long time, horizontal wells (HRWs) have been explored for remediation technologies only in last few decades. HRWs have shown to outperform vertical wells in terms of versatility, productivity and clean-up times under certain conditions. In this paper, the efficacy of an innovative pump-and-treat (P&T) configuration for groundwater remediation obtained by adopting either VRWs or HRWs technology is comparatively tested. A 3D transient finite element model of an unconfined aquifer containing a hexavalent chromium (Cr(VI)) contamination plume is considered to compare a single horizontal well configuration vs a range of spatially-optimised arrays containing vertical wells. A sensitivity analysis aimed at finding the best configuration to minimise the remediation time and the related cost is carried out by comparing different well diameters, D, pumping rates, Q, and position of wells. A comparative cost analysis demonstrates that, for the examined case-study, a single HRW achieves the clean-up goals in the same time span as for a greater number of vertical wells, but at higher price due to the excavation costs