WEUSEDTO—Water End USE Dataset and TOols: An open water end use consumption dataset and data analytics tools

Globalization, climate changes, innovative technologies and new human habits have increased atten- tion to water conservation and management. Therefore, behavioural studies became a key element to understand how and when water is used in residential environment. Water End USE Dataset and TOols (WEUSEDTO), an open water end use consumption dataset and data analytics tools, has been released to help researchers, water utilities and companies to test models and algorithms on real water consumption data. The dataset combines with some notebook python able to analyse high-resolution water data (data recorded with 1 sample per second) to provide several tools to manage raw data, compute statistical analysis, learn fixture usage and generate synthetic simulation models. In addition, washbasin flow data were used as a test case to illustrate the main features of WEUSEDTO: providing volume and duration of single events, classifying usages and simulating user’s behaviour

Dynamic control of water distribution system based on network partitioning

The availability on the market of remote control valves for water distribution systems allows a more flexible implementation of the “divide and conquer” paradigm, that consists in dividing large networks into smaller district meter areas defining a water network partitioning (WNP), aiming at controlling water balance, pressure levels and water quality protection. The positioning of gate valves is carried out using optimization approaches to guarantee the network reliability that can be significantly reduced by WNP owing to the closure of several pipes by means of gate valves, decreasing topologic and energy redundancy. Anyway, starting from the optimal positioning of remote controlled gate valves, obtained with SWANP software, the paper investigates the effectiveness of dynamic control, in order to face hydraulic failure in fire estinguishment. The proposed methodology, based on heuristic optimization algorithm, finds the optimal layouts minimizing the number of valves to be opened and maximizing the system performance. The study highlights the advantages of adaptively reconfigurable networks starting from a partitioned system, confirming that a dynamic control represents a significant improvement for smart water networks

Overview of Energy Management and Leakage Control Systems for Smart Water Grids and Digital Water

Current and future smart cities are moving towards the zero-net energy use concept. To this end, the built environment should also be designed for efficient energy use and play a significant role in the production of such energy. At present, this is achieved by focusing on energy demand in buildings and to the renewable trade-off related to smart power grids. However, urban water distribution systems constantly carry an excess of hydraulic energy that can potentially be recovered to produce electricity. This paper presents a comprehensive review of current strategies for energy production by reviewing the state-of-the-art of smart water systems. New technologies (such as cyber-physical systems, digital twins, blockchain) and new methodologies (network dynamics, geometric deep learning) associated with digital water are also discussed. The paper then focuses on modelling the installation of both micro-turbines and pumps as turbines, instead of/together with pressure reduction valves, to further demonstrate the energy-recovery methods which will enable water network partitioning into district metered areas. The associated benefits on leakage control, as a source of energy, and for contributing to overall network resilience are also highlighted. The paper concludes by presenting future research directions. Notably, digital water is proposed as the main research and operational direction for current and future Water Distribution Systems (WDS) and as a holistic, data-centred framework for the operation and management of water networks.</jats:p

Optimal Sensor Placement in a Partitioned Water Distribution Network for the Water Protection from Contamination

Water network protection from accidental and intentional contamination is one of the most critical issues for preserving the citizen health. Recently, some techniques have been proposed in the literature to define the optimal sensor placement. On the other hand, through the definition of permanent DMAs (District Meter Areas), water network partitioning allows significant reduction in the number of exposed users through the full isolation of DMA. In this paper, the optimal sensor placement is coupled with water network partitioning in order to define the best location of isolation valves and control stations, to be closed and installed respectively. The proposed procedure is based on different procedures, and it was tested on a real water network, showing that it is possible both to mitigate the impact of a water contamination and simplify the sensor placement through the water network partitioning

Discontinuous permeable adsorptive barrier design and cost analysis: a methodological approach to optimisation

The following paper presents a method to optimise a discontinuous permeable adsorptive barrier (PAB-D). This method is based on the comparison of different PAB-D configurations obtained by changing some of the main PAB-D design parameters. In particular, the well diameters, the distance between two consecutive passive wells and the distance between two consecutive well lines were varied, and a cost analysis for each configuration was carried out in order to define the best performing and most cost-effective PAB-D configuration. As a case study, a benzene-contaminated aquifer located in an urban area in the north of Naples (Italy) was considered. The PAB-D configuration with a well diameter of 0.8 m resulted the best optimised layout in terms of performance and cost-effectiveness. Moreover, in order to identify the best configuration for the remediation of the aquifer studied, a comparison with a continuous permeable adsorptive barrier (PAB-C) was added. In particular, this showed a 40% reduction of the total remediation costs by using the optimised PAB-D

Water Supply Network Partitioning Based on Simultaneous Cost and Energy Optimization

Water Network Partitioning (WNP) improves water network management, simplifying the computation of water budgets and, consequently, allowing the identification and reduction of water loss. It is achieved by inserting flow meters and gate valves in the network, previously clustered in subsystems. The clustering and partitioning phases are carried out with different procedures. The first one requires clustering algorithms that assign network nodes to each district (or cluster). The second one chooses the boundary pipes where flow meters or gate valves are to be inserted. In this paper, SWANP software is employed to achieve a network clustering through two different algorithms based on a multilevel-recursive bisection and community-structure procedures. After that, a novel multi-objective function is introduced and applied to a large Mexican network integrating both cost and energy performance, thus providing a smart Decision Support System (DSS) based on qualitative and quantitative measures, and diagrams for evaluating the optimal layout in terms of the number of districts, cost, and hydraulic performance

Optimal Design Of Network Partitioning For Water Distribution System Protection From Intentional Contamination

The intentional contamination of water distribution systems represents one of the major risks for citizens, consequently after 11th September 2001 many international organizations have been concerned about it. The availability at low cost of new monitoring and management devices, controlled by a remote system, allows to define different layouts of the water network in a new paradigm of dynamic layouts of water distribution systems in which an important role is played by water network partitioning and sectorization. Recently the advantages of these techniques have been investigated to analyse their application to the problem of water network protection from the contamination. The possibility of designing districts and sectors reduces the risk of affecting many people because several points of contaminant introduction would be needed to produce a wide negative impact on the network. Furthermore, the closure of the sectors, in which the contamination occurs, allows to protect significantly a part of the users. This way the water network partitioning respects the criteria of dual-use value because districts and sectors, in addition to protect the network from contamination, are essentially defined for other aims (water balance, pressure management, etc.) optimizing the costs. The design of the water network partitioning is essentially based only on the reduction of the negative effects on hydraulic performance due to the insertion of gate valves in the network, but not on the minimization of the negative effects of a possible contamination. In this study a novel methodology is proposed that allows to optimize the design of water network partitioning both for compliance of hydraulic performance and for water protection. The methodology is based on heuristic optimization techniques that optimize a costrained multiobjective fuction. The analysis was carried out with different contaminant and sectorization scenarios on a real multiple source water distribution network in Mexico

Pump-and-treat configurations with vertical and horizontal wells to remediate an aquifer contaminated by hexavalent chromium

Pump-and-treat technology is among the most used technologies for groundwater remediation. While conventional, vertical wells (VRWs) are well-known and used from long time, horizontal wells (HRWs) have been explored for remediation technologies only in last few decades. HRWs have shown to outperform vertical wells in terms of versatility, productivity and clean-up times under certain conditions. In this paper, the efficacy of an innovative pump-and-treat (P&T) configuration for groundwater remediation obtained by adopting either VRWs or HRWs technology is comparatively tested. A 3D transient finite element model of an unconfined aquifer containing a hexavalent chromium (Cr(VI)) contamination plume is considered to compare a single horizontal well configuration vs a range of spatially-optimised arrays containing vertical wells. A sensitivity analysis aimed at finding the best configuration to minimise the remediation time and the related cost is carried out by comparing different well diameters, D, pumping rates, Q, and position of wells. A comparative cost analysis demonstrates that, for the examined case-study, a single HRW achieves the clean-up goals in the same time span as for a greater number of vertical wells, but at higher price due to the excavation costs

An optimized configuration of adsorptive wells for the remediation of an aquifer contaminated by multiple aromatic hydrocarbon pollutants

Adsorptive wells arrays are an innovative outline of Permeable Reactive Barrier (PRBs) made of a definite number of passive deep wells opportunely distributed in the aquifer, known as PAB-D (Discontinuous Permeable Adsorptive Barrier). They are generally located downstream the contaminated groundwater flow and perpendicularly to the groundwater flow direction. Being PAB-D wells filled with adsorbing media, whose hydraulic permeability is higher than the surrounding media, the array will create a targeted capture zone, which will force the contaminated water to pass through the whole PAB-D, allowing for both the interception of the contaminant plume and its treatment. In this work, an optimized configuration of PAB-D is presented, for the in situ-remediation of an aquifer simultaneously contaminated by benzene and toluene. The design optimization of the PAB-D was performed by using COMSOL Multiphysics®, in which numerical simulations reproduced the transport and the adsorptive phenomena occurring inside the aquifer and the barrier itself. The proposed technique was applied to the remediation of an aquifer located in an urban area in the north of Naples (Italy), in proximity of numerous landfills, where the contamination was spread over an area of 0.10 km2. Simulation results confirm the effectiveness of the PAB-D, being both pollutant plumes intercepted and their concentrations reduced below their correspondent Italian regulatory threshold values. The best array configuration of PAB-D resulted made of 741 wells, each having a diameter of 0.6 m, which was also compared with a continuous barrier (PAB-C) showing a reduction of about 49% of the volume and 35% of the overall remediation cost