Beyond trial and error: improving the management of intermittently-operated water distribution networks

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Safe tap water is easily taken for granted. Yet Flint, Michigan and Walkerton, Ontario point to the devastating consequences of unsafe and unreliable piped water. The long-term vision of the proposed research program is to improve piped water's safety, reliability, and equity by creating better ways of managing piped water networks. The research will begin by focusing on the least reliable water networks: networks that are not always filled with pressurized water. In India, for example, utilities supply water for an average of only four hours per day! Globally, such intermittent water supplies serve one billion people (21% of piped water users) and cause 17 million infections annually. Piped water networks behave differently when they operate intermittently. Intermittent operations cause pipes to drain and refill frequently and intermittent operations prevent some customers from getting enough water. These differences make managing intermittent water supplies difficult and limit the usefulness of tools designed for managing continuously-operated networks. Accordingly, most utilities manage intermittent water supplies through trial and error. But the water supplies of one billion people should not be managed by trial and error. Three short-term objectives are, therefore, proposed: First, increase the percent of water utilities that use models (instead of trial and error) to manage intermittent systems. Existing academic models of intermittent water supplies have the potential to help manage systems, yet are unused by utilities. The proposed work will help utilities choose and use the most appropriate model for their network. Second, enable utilities to intermittently supply customers with similar volumes of water. Determining the volume of water that a customer gets in an intermittent system with academic models requires expensive-to-gather details about each pipe in that system. Instead, this work will create a simpler model of how equitably water is distributed within an intermittent system. The simpler model will not require detailed pipe information and will be cheaper for utilities to use. Third, reduce the burst pipes and wasted energy caused by air trapped in water networks. Filling water pipes can trap pockets of air, which can cause pressure spikes and block the flow of water in continuously- and intermittently-operated networks. Existing models of air in water pipes only work for simple networks. This work will create the first model of trapped air in a utility-sized network. Impact: This research will improve our understanding of how air and water flow through pipes and allow water utilities to increase their efficiency and reliability. One billion people stand to benefit from the increased reliability of intermittent water supplies. Moreover, Canada's water sector will benefit from better ways of managing trapped air and from HQP with the practical and theoretical skills needed to keep our piped water safe and reliable.