Leakage Reduction in Water Distribution Networks By Minimizing the Excess Pressure

Leakage is one of the most serious problems in water distribution networks. Limited resources of water and the increasing expenses of transport, treatment, pumping, storage and distribution of water, notify the importance of leakage reduction. Due to the direct relation between leakage and pressure, pressure management is a useful and cost effective method for leakage reduction. In this research pressure reducing valves are used to achieve this goal. An optimization procedure is applied to minimize the difference between the available head and minimum standard head at each node. Sum of square differences between the available and minimum standard heads at each node are minimized using linear and non linear programming. To analyze the hydraulic conditions of the system the head driven simulation method is used. In this method the available nodal outflows are not fixed and vary with nodal pressure fluctuations. Finally a test network, have been used to illustrate the validation of the proposed method. The results of this procedure define the PRV’s outlet values. Based on these optimized values, nodal heads tend to be very close to the minimum standard values which lead to the maximum leak reduction.