Blog – Page 6 – Water Simulation

Water Canary – is it real?

Elad SalomonsPosted on November 10, 2012 Posted in Hardware — 10 Comments ↓

I have been watching the Water Canary project from the beginning of the year waiting for some news – nothing yet. I first saw the Ted video, which is just great:

Searching for more information only got me the simple, PR style, text from it’s web-site:

The Water Canary is an inexpensive water-testing device that makes it possible to collect real-time water quality data from the field. With the push of a button, anyone can measure water quality and share that information with the world.
By placing real-time water quality information within reach, the devices make it possible to quickly identify invisible threats so that appropriate actions can be taken to protect people and ecosystems and prevent hazards from erupting into full-scale emergencies.

Even the ‘Technology‘ page does not add any information. This reminded me of the “Compost-Fueled Cars: Wouldn’t That Be Great?” video. Hope I’m wrong.

If anyone has any real information about the Water Canary I would love to hear about it. Messages sent via their contact form were unanswered.

Tagged with: ted, water canary, water quality, water safety

The Value of Water

Elad SalomonsPosted on November 8, 2012 Posted in Papers and Research — No Comments ↓

According to a survey by Xylem American say that “water is the most important service they receive, ahead of electricity, heat, the Internet and cell phones. Among businesses, it ranks second only to electricity. ”

Water has for too long been absent from the national debate on infrastructure. Hidden underground, the deterioration of our nation’s water pipes and treatment systems has become an unseen crisis. In an era of water scarcity and tight budgets, we can no longer afford to lose nearly two trillion gallons of clean water, at an annual cost of $2.6 billion, to broken and leaking pipes every year.

ITT ’s nationwide survey on the value of water details what Americans think should be done about this crisis—and who should pay for it.

View an interactive version of the survey or download the pdf file.

Tagged with: survey, Xylem

Guest posts – invitation to write on this blog

Elad SalomonsPosted on November 5, 2012 Posted in General — 2 Comments ↓

Hi all,

From time to time people send great information to share with the readers of this blog. I have decided to step it up a little and give a try to guest posts. Your content may reach hundreds of reader each day and over 900 water professionals on my newsletter.

Topics which may be of interest to my readers (all related to water of course):

software (free and commercial)
hardware
research
books
events
projects

Just browse the blog to get some ideas. Oh, no press releases please 🙂

Interested? drop me a line

Water is responsible for 12.6% of US energy use

Elad SalomonsPosted on November 4, 2012 Posted in Papers and Research — No Comments ↓

According to a research from the University of Texas titled “Evaluating the energy consumed for water use in the United States“, water is responsible for 12.6% of US energy use:

From the abstract:

This letter consists of a first-order analysis of the primary energy embedded in water in the United States. Using a combination of top-down sectoral assessments of energy use together with a bottom-up allocation of energy-for-water on a component-wise and service-specific level, our analysis concludes that energy use in the residential, commercial, industrial and power sectors for direct water and steam services was approximately 12.3 ± 0.3 quadrillion BTUs or 12.6% of the 2010 annual primary energy consumption in the United States. Additional energy was used to generate steam for indirect process heating, space heating and electricity generation.

The full paper is available from Environmental Research Letters.

Tagged with: energy

EPANET-RTX real time extension for the EPANET toolkit

Elad SalomonsPosted on September 26, 2012 Posted in Announcements, EPANET related, Free software, Programming — 2 Comments ↓

The United States Environmental Protection Agency, National Homeland Security Research Center announces the open source project for EPANET-RTX.

What is EPANET-RTX? RTX (the real-time extension) is the first open-source library to extend the base EPANET hydraulic and water quality simulation functionality to include SCADA data acquisition and predictive forecasting capabilities. The typical use of this toolkit is building an application that loads a water utility’s hydraulic network model to run an extended-period simulation driven by sensor measurements stored in a SCADA historian. The goal of the RTX library is to make this complex task more accessible to programmers and engineers. The user of this library can incorporate as little or as much of the functionality as desired. For instance, RTX library components could be used to connect to a SCADA system, clean certain data streams (such as a tank level or flow measurement), and provide a predictive forecast of sensor data. RTX can also be used as an object abstraction layer for EPANET (e.g., for GUI development or other purposes). EPANET-RTX paves the way for building situational awareness tools to improve the operation, management, and security of water systems.

Intended Audience: RTX is intended for use by programmers and engineers interested in building data-fused hydraulic modeling environments. This is considered a “development release;” the code is under active development but this release announcement is being made in order to inform the water modeling community and generate interest amongst potential contributors.

Included Example Application: Along with the code base, we’ve provided the first RTX application. The “Validator” application uses the RTX library to load an EPANET network model and run a “real-time” simulation based on example SCADA data. The purpose of the application is to demonstrate the sorts of tasks that are possible using this new toolkit.

License: RTX is released under the BSD 2-clause license, which permits redistribution and use of EPANET-RTX in source and binary forms, with or without modification, provided that the full copyright notice and a list of disclaimers are included in the distribution.

Learn More: Visit http://openwateranalytics.github.com/epanet-rtx/

Tagged with: features, open source

WaterNetGen – EPANET extension – pipe sizing

Elad SalomonsPosted on January 22, 2012 Posted in EPANET related, Free software — 23 Comments ↓

Update: following a comment by Joaquim Sousa, one of the developers of WaterNetGen, I have updated the post since it seems I made a mistake and didn’t use the right settings for the SA method – sorry.

A few months ago, researchers from Coimbra (Portugal) released the WaterNetGen program. WaterNetGen is a free EPANet extension to automatically build water distribution networks synthetic models, do pipe sizing, compute technical performance indicators, and allowed demand-driven and pressure-driven simulations.

WaterNetGen is an extension of the EPANET 2.0 software (Rossman 2000) that preserves the user interface and allows the generation of synthetic water distribution network models (Muranho et al. 2012) and its sizing based on simple heuristics (Muranho et al. 2011). It also allows to perform least cost design, by using a Simulated Annealing algorithm, and pressure-driven analysis, a better suited approach to model pressure dependent consumption and leakage.

I have not tested all its feature but did try the pipe sizing option which uses the Simulated Annealing optimization method. The network I tested was the Hanoi water network benchmark.

First open the Hanoi INP file using WaterNetGen. Now open the ‘Pipe Catalogue’ from the WaterNetGen menu and enter the following data.

Now click CRTL-A to select all pipes (nice) , right click on the map to select the ‘Pipe Type’

Choose the only available option (1 – 1):

Now fire up the ‘Pipe Sizing’ screen and set the values marked in red. Check the ‘Set Initial Diameters’ option, select ‘Set to Max from Catalog’ and click the ‘Run’ button. This will set all pipes diameters to 1,016mm. I’m not sure why the minimum pressure is to be set in kPa and not meters or feet but 294Pa are about 30 meters. Also set the maximum pressure to a high value since the Hanoi problem does not have a maximum pressure constraint. The same goes for the velocity constraints – set the minmum value to 0.00001 and the maximum to 10.

Last thing to do is set the ‘Generator Seed’ to 1 for the SA method:

Now click the ‘Run’ button and wait:

The solution cost is 6,081,115 which is around the range of previous published results. For example, WaterIng came up with a solution of 6,100,000. The optimized file is here but please note that it can be opened only with WaterNetGen and not the regular EPANet version.

I will try to evaluate the other WaterNetGen features in the near future.

Tagged with: features, hanoi, optimization, WaterNetGen

The Battle of the Water Networks (BWN-II)

Elad SalomonsPosted on January 18, 2012 Posted in Announcements — No Comments ↓

During the 14th Water Distribution Systems Analysis Conference (WDSA 2012), a new Battle of the Water Networks will be held:

The Battle of the Water Networks (BWN-II) is the fourth in a series of “Battle Competitions” dating back to the “Battle of the Water Networks” in 1985 and more recently the “Battle of the Water Sensor Networks” in 2006 and the “Battle of the Water Calibration Networks” in 2010.

The BWN-II calls for teams/individuals from academia, consulting firms, and utilities to propose a design methodology and apply it to a real water distribution system. The results of the BWN-II will be presented at a special session of the upcoming 14th Water Distribution Systems Analysis Symposium.

Each participating team/individual must submit an on-line abstract by February 17, 2012 for the WDSA2012 conference that briefly discusses the proposed design approach (e.g., trial and error with simulation, evolutionary computation, heuristics, etc.). Notifications of accepted/rejected abstracts will be made by March 16, 2012.

Keep your eye on this page.

Tagged with: bwcn, bwn-II, bwsn, features, wdsa 2012

Stated NRW (Non-Revenue Water) Rates in Urban Networks

Elad SalomonsPosted on January 15, 2012 Posted in Papers and Research — No Comments ↓

A few months ago, the SWAN forum published a list of stated NRW (Non-Revenue Water) rates in urban networks (pdf file).

Water Balance (AWWA / IWA)

According to this list there are major cities with non-revenue water rate higher than 30%:

Adana Turkey 69.0%
Bacolod Philippines 37.0%
Bangalore India 36.0%
Bangkok Thailand 34.0%
Bogota Colombia 41.0%
Bucharest Romania 46.0%
Caserta Italy 38.6%
Cork Ireland 45.0%
Delhi India 53.0%
Dhaka Bangladesh 40.0%
Diyarbakir Turkey 51.0%
Dublin Ireland 40.0%
Galsgow UK 44.0%
Katmandu Nepal 37.0%
Kayseri Turkey 45.0%
Kuala Lumpur Malaysia 35.0%
Lima Peru 37.0%
Manila West Philippines 53.0%
Mexico City Mexico 37.0%
Monterrey Mexico 31.4%
Montreal Canada 40.0%
Nairobi Kenya 34.0%
Naples Italy 35.0%
Rawalpindi Pakistan 46.0%
Rome Italy 37.8%
Sao Paulo Brazil 38.0%
Sofia Bulgaria 62.0%

Amazing!

Tagged with: features, nrw, swan