Document Type
Presentation
Publication Date
8-1-2014
Abstract
With significant drinking water loss rates >10% during distribution at many drinking water utilities worldwide, the detection of new leaks, especially small and slowly growing leaks, remains an important challenge for the water sector. Time series of flow rates into isolated or completely metered distribution areas (e.g. District Metered Areas) contain signals of all existing and new leaks in that area, and also of all other processes taking place, e.g. changes in demand, operations, etc. Therefore, in principle these data can provide valuable information about new leaks, unregistered changes in valve status, etc. However, distinguishing one from the others is often difficult. The CFPD (Comparison of Flow Pattern Distributions) method is a flow time series data transformation which facilitates the identification, quantification, and interpretation of changes in the amounts of water supplied. Contrary to the often applied minimum night flow analysis, it uses all available flow data (24 hours per day, resolution of 1 measurement per hour or better) and recognizes different types of changes. In this way, it helps to distinguish e.g. new leaks from operational signals and demand changes. In the past year, it has been successfully applied at several Dutch drinking water companies. In this paper, we illustrate the application of the CFPD method by presenting selected results from CFPD analyses of flow data for 16 of 30 DMAs in the city of Paris. The findings are compared to a list of registered leaks.
Comments
Session R57, Water Distribution Networks: Leak Detection I