Water Simulation Packages (WSP)

A History of Water Distribution: Bentley’s Tom Walski takes you back in time to learn how water distribution technology has evolved to provide us with clean and sufficient water today.

As published in Journal AWWA, Vol. 98, No. 3 (March 2006). American Water Works Association

Full paper

EPA has released a new tool for small water utilities trying to balance the demands for quality water with their financial ability to deliver. The tool is part of an overall program to protect public health, support small water systems and keep costs of water manageable. The targeted systems serve 3,300 customers or fewer.
The document, “Setting Small Drinking Water System Rates for a Sustainable Future,” will help owners and operators understand the full costs of providing a quality and adequate supply of drinking water to their customers and guide them in setting water rates that will support these costs.

The document is available at:
www.epa.gov/water/infrastructure/pdf/final_ratesetting_guide.pdf

Source: Safe Water Trust

With pumping systems accounting for about 20% of the world’s energy usage, a great potential for cost and energy savings exists within such systems. Unfortunately, pumping system design engineers work in an environment where budget and schedule constraints limit their ability to optimize their systems using traditional methods. “Optimizing Pumping Systems To Minimize First Or Life-Cycle Cost”, featured in the October 2002 issue of Pumps & Systems magazine, describes the new technology of IntelliFlow® embodied in AFT Mercury that now allows the systems engineer to truly optimize the sizing of their systems’ piping and components resulting in huge savings potentials. Jointly authored by Trey Walters of AFT and Judy Hodgson of Dupont, the article also presents several real world examples where life cycle cost savings of up to 70% were achieved. The Pumps & Systems article was derived from “Optimizing Pumping Systems to Minimize First or Life-Cycle Cost”, presented to the 19th International Pump Users Symposium.

You can find the full text of this original paper by clicking here.

An article by the Safe Drinking Water Trust:

Distribution system flushing programs have been around for a long, long time. In a nutshell, these programs provide systems with an organized way to clean out the rust and other sediments that have settled in the water lines over the years. Whether water system crews simply crack open a few fire hydrants around town or have spent a great deal of time devising an in-depth unidirectional flushing program (UFP), it’s a sure bet that if your system hasn’t been flushed for awhile your water quality will suffer. If this is the case, then there is no time like the present to take a closer look at your distribution system’s preventative maintenance program before you receive a phone call like:

Read the full article here.

The Human-Competitive Awards, the “Humies”, are awarded to techniques of genetic and evolutionary computation that are competitive with the work of creative and inventive humans.

The Darwin Designer team, from Haestad Methods, won an honorable mention this year for their water distribution design genetic algorithm solver. The method is presented in “OPTIMIZING WATER SYSTEM IMPROVEMENT FOR A GROWING COMMUNITY”

Abstract:

To meet the water supply requirement in a growing community, system improvement alternatives needs to be identified to satisfy the increasing demand. This paper shows that the intelligent optimization modeling tool can assist practical engineers and decision-maker to optimize system expansions and prioritize the budget allocation of capital improvement program (CIP) for a real world water system. The water distribution system undertaken for study represents a community where the water consumption is projected to grow 30% in 15 years. Increasing consumption requires that the water system be improved to move water from sources into the growing areas. The criteria for enhancing the system capacity include satisfying the pressure requirement, the maximum allowable flow velocity and sufficient tank storage. The improvement task is to identify the feasible pipe routes and pipe sizes of the new pipes. Due to the complex interconnectivity and the large combinations of possible pipe routes/sizes, it proved technically impossible for experienced engineers to identify a feasible design solution. GA-based optimization design tool has been applied to forge the cost-effective system improvement solutions. The study shows that optimization modeling is a powerful approach for supporting and enhancing a sound decision-making process in water industry.

Wu Z. Y., Walski T. M., Naumick G., Dugandzic J. and Nasuti R. (2005) “Optimizing Water system improvement for a growing community.” proc. of International Conference of Computing and Control in the Water Industry, Sept. 5-7 2005, Exeter, UK

For more information see:
The “Humies” award
“OPTIMIZING WATER SYSTEM IMPROVEMENT FOR A GROWING COMMUNITY”
Darwin Designer

Here is a message from Dr. Avi Ostfeld:

Dear Colleagues,

On May 26, 2005 I have issued a call to this list on a “Battle of the Sensors” exercise as part of the planned Special Issue of the Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management on Drinking Water Distribution Systems Security. Since than I have worked closely with Prof. Jim Uber from the University of Cincinnati to formulate the “Battle” rules, network examples, etc. and came to two main conclusions: (1) the “Battle” is an extremely interesting and challenging issue, and (2) it would be much better to have a session (or more) on that topic, prior to moving to a journal manuscript. We (myself and Jim) are inviting you all (see attached initial announcement) to take part at this challenge during the 8th Water Distribution Systems Analysis SYMPOSIUM in Cincinnati, August 27-30, 2006. If you have any further questions or concerns don’t hesitate to contact me or Jim.

Thanks,

Avi

Read the announcement (in PDF format).

Derceto, Inc. were one of the exhibitors at the AWWA Annual Conference (ACE05) in San Francisco in June. The company released an article titled: “Implementing an Energy Management System for Distribution Pumping“.

Here are a few words taken from the publication just to get you started:

The system generates an optimized pump schedule solution for the next 24 to 48 hours. Telemetry data on treated water reservoirs levels and pump flows is received from the Supervisory Control and Data Accusation System (SCADA) every 10 minutes. Derceto takes account of daily zonal demand variations, available supply capacity, system constraints, and power cost information. Every half hour a schedule for each pump is generated for the next 24 to 48 hours. These schedules are then updated based on real-time demand data and reservoir levels, which may be varying from predicted values. The Derceto EWQMS contains six major components. A water demand forecaster, a pump schedule optimizer, water quality module, energy cost calculator and a state estimator/data cleaner and the SCADA interface.

Read the full article here.

Manuel López-Ibáñez, currently at the School of the Built Environment of Napier University in Edinburgh (UK), adapted the EPANET Toolkit version 2.00.10 to GNU/Linux.

A number of new features were added:

• Calculation of pump switches
• Saves time of day (in seconds) when a pump changes its status. The vector of pump scheduling is obtained using ENgetlinkvalue()
• ENgetnodevalue() can return the initial (EN_INITVOL) and current volume (EN_VOLUME) of a tank.
• ENgetcount() returns the number of pumps and the number of reservoirs in the network.
• When ENgetcount(EN_CONTROLCOUNT, &count), a control may be added dynamically calling ENsetcontrol() with cindex = count + 1

New toolkit functions:

• ENgettotalenergycost() : calculates total energy cost per pump plus demand cost.
• ENgetpumpswitches() : number of switches of a pump.
• ENaddleveltrig() : adds rule with the following format
  IF SYSTEM CLOCKTIME >= start_time (in seconds)
AND SYSTEM CLOCKTIME < stop_time (in seconds)
AND TANK id(tank_index) LEVEL [BELOW|ABOVE] level
THEN PUMP id(pump_index) STATUS IS status
• ENgetminstoptime() : returns the shortest time interval (in seconds) that a certain pump was not active.
• ENgettankindex() and ENgetpumpindex() : allow to find a pump or tank without knowing its id or index.
• ENaddpattern() adds a new pattern to the database.

This version is highly experimental but Manuel is doing a serious effort to document the changes. He is using a Control Version System (CVS) to keep track of the development, so this version is open to contributions from anyone. Manuel is hoping to obtain feedback in the form of code, testing, reports, acknowledge or just complains.

For more information, and download, please see Manuel López-Ibáñez web page.

Following the cal for the Special JWRPM Issue on Drinking Water Distribution Systems Security, Avi Ostfeld sent the information regarding the “Battle of the Sensors”:

Dear Colleagues,

Following my announcement of yesterday on a Special Issue of the Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management on Drinking Water Distribution Systems Security, here are a few more details on the “Battle of the Sensors” manuscript: the basic idea is to compare and discuss different published methodologies (i.e., published either in a journal, conference, or as a report so that an accessible reference can be quoted) for sensors/monitoring allocations using a well defined example (e.g., EPANET Example 3). Each of the participants will get the “rules” of the “Battle” (actually it’s not really a Battle; it’s more a comparison. The name “Battle” is induced from the Battle of the Networks paper of Walski et al., 1987) and will need to return (to me) with a short description of his recommendation as of where to put the sensors, the objective function he used, the detection likelihood of the sensors to reveal a contaminant intrusion, etc. I will receive all the reports and put them together: first each as a stand alone entity, and then as an ensemble looking at the differences between the methodologies, discuss their advantages and limitations, and suggest future directions. The next stage will be to send back the paper to all the participants for their approval and comments. Once I receive back all the comments I will submit the paper to the JWRPLM Chief Editor to perform the regular review process. I anticipate that the probability of such a paper to be rejected is very low. In addition, since we are looking at a single manuscript we are bounded by the 10000 equivalent word limitation of the journal so each of the participants will have a limited space. I hope this puts more light on the exercise which I anticipate to be very interesting. If any of you would like to participate, please let me know by June 7, 2005. Once have the list I will define exactly the “rules”, set the timeline, and distribute.

Thanks, Avi.

The following call was received form Dr. Avi Ostfeld:

Dear Colleagues,

Following the EWRI conference in Anchorage, Alaska, May 15-19, 2005, and the growing interest in water distribution systems security, a special issue of the Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management on Drinking Water Distribution Systems Security has been approved. The special JWRPM issue is tentatively scheduled to appear July/August 2006.

The major themes of the issue will be: sensors/monitoring stations allocations; disinfectant residuals control; contaminant inverse modeling methodologies; pollutants containment; case studies implementations; and a “Battle of the Sensors” exercise.

The manuscripts will be peer-reviewed with the normal rigor of any standard submittal to the JWRPM, but on an accelerated schedule as outlined below:

June 1, 2005: Final date for authors to express their interest in submitting a paper to the special issue by providing a manuscript title and authors names; and in participating at the “Battle of the Sensors” exercise [sent to Avi Ostfeld (ostfeld@tx.technion.ac.il)]
Aug 1, 2005: Final date for authors to submit 1st draft of paper (pdf to Ostfeld)
Sep 20, 2005: Provide 1st round review comments to authors, including preliminary decision
Nov 1, 2005: Final date for authors to submit 2nd draft of paper
Nov 25, 2005: Provide 2nd round review comments to authors, including final decision
Dec 15, 2005: Final date for authors to submit final version of accepted manuscript (pdf to Ostfeld)
Dec 31, 2005: Editor sends approved final versions to ASCE for copyediting

Please forward this message to any additional authors who might be interested in this initiative.

Sincerely yours,

Avi Ostfeld
Associate Editor, JWRPM