Application of Central Force Optimization Method to Design Transient Protection Devices for Water Transmission Pipelines

One of the major challenges in designing under pressure water transmission pipeline is the system protection against water-hammer pressures due to a pump trip. The best strategy is to use air-chamber; which imposes considerable costs. To mitigate the air-chamber volume, the use of air-inlet valves is also suggested. Determination of air-chamber volume as well as the type and proper locations of air-inlet valves, aiming at the cost reduction, introduces an optimization problem. To solve this problem, this study exploits the central force optimization (CFO) method. Herein, a case study pipeline is optimized using the proposed model based on the CFO and is compared with results of a genetic algorithm (GA) based model. Both methods yielded almost the same results and led to about 30% saving in the system protection cost. However, a comparison between the methods showed that the CFO dramatically outperforms GA in both terms of computational efficiency and reliability of the results.