Locating pipe bursts in a District Metered Area via online hydraulic modelling

Abstract

This paper presents an online burst location method which extends the recently developed methodology [1] for online burst detection in Water Distribution Systems (WDS) at the District Metered Area (DMA) level. This is achieved by a combination of data algorithms that make use of flow and pressure residuals between the online hydraulic model predictions and corresponding WDS observations. The leak location methodology was tested on a series of simulated pipe burst events in a real-life UK DMA. The results obtained show that the new methodology is effective in determining burst locations in near real-time and satisfactorily estimates the burst flows.