A Proposed Method for Locating of Leaky Areas in Water Supply Networks Based on Flow Hydraulic Grade Line

Leaks in water supply networks cause problems such as water loss and contamination. Due to the difficulties of the current leak detection methods, some methods are recently being developed that use network field data (in the form of flow or pressure) and hydraulic simulation to determine the location of leaks. In this paper, a new method is proposed for locating the leaky areas in water supply networks, based on the results of field pressure measurements and investigating the hydraulic grade line. Suggestions on the number and arrangement of pressure meters in the network were also recommended. The obtained results for three scenarios in a looped water network with 30 junctions were presented. The results showed that this method can correctly identify the leak areas with no limitation on the number of simultaneous leaks in the network. On the other hand, this method is verifiable, unlike the most commonly leak analytical methods. In this methodology, if the number of field pressure meters increases, the reported leaky areas become smaller. As a scenario, by increasing the number of pressure meters from 3 to 4, the reported area gets halved. The proposed method can be utilized by operators of water distribution and transport networks.