Pipe Roughness Identification of Water Distribution Networks: The Full Turbulent Case

TL;DR

This paper introduces a method to accurately identify pipe roughness parameters in water distribution networks by inverting hydraulic equations, improving model reliability for leak detection, especially under turbulent flow conditions.

Contribution

It presents a novel inversion-based technique for pipe roughness identification in turbulent flow regimes, enhancing hydraulic model accuracy for water networks.

Findings

Method effectively estimates pipe roughness parameters.

Improves leak detection accuracy in water networks.

Validated through simulation examples.

Abstract

This paper proposes a technique to identify individual pipe roughness parameters in a water distribution network by means of the inversion of the steady-state hydraulic network equations. By enabling the reconstruction of these hydraulic friction parameters to be reliable, this technique improves the conventional model's accuracy and thereby promises to enhance model-based leakage detection and localization. As it is the case in so-called fireflow tests, this methodology is founded on the premise to measure the pressure distributed at a subset of nodes in the network's graph while assuming the nodal consumption to be known. Beside of the proposed problem formulation, which is restricted to only allow turbulent flow in each of the network's pipes initially, developed algorithms are presented and evaluated using simulation examples.