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Immission of civil sewage into sea is realized to complete the onshore depurative process or to take out the already purified waste-water from the bathing area, ensuring a good perceived seawater quality. Anyhow the compliance of the pollutant concentrations limits is necessary to ensure safe bathing. The design of submarine pipes is usually completed contemplating a diffuser with a series of ports for the repartition of the wastewater discharge. The real process of pollutants diffusion into the sea, simulated with complex diffusion-dispersion models in a motion-field dependent from environmental conditions and drift speeds, affect the submarine pipe design. A design optimization procedure has been realized for the marine outfall pipe-diffuser system using a simplified zone model, subjected to a sensitivity analysis on the characteristic parameter. The method is shown using an example project for the submarine outfall at service for the sewage treatment plant of Belvedere Marittimo, on the southern Tyrrhenian Sea in Italy.

The correct management of urban water networks have to be supported by monitoring and estimating water quality. The infrastructure maintenance status and the possibility of a prevention plan availability influence the potential risk of contamination. In this context, the Contamination Source Identification (CSI) models aim to identify the contamination source starting from the concentration values referring to the nodes. This paper proposes a methodology based on Dynamics of Network Pollution (DNP). The DNP approach, linked to the pollution matrix and the incidence matrix, allows a topological analysis on the network structure in order to identify the nodes and paths most sensitive to contamination, namely those that favor a more critical diffusion of the introduced contaminant. The procedure is proposed with the aim of optimally identifying the potential contamination points. By simulating the contamination of a synthetic network, using a bottom-up approach, an optimized procedure is defined to trace back to the chosen node as the most probable contamination source.

A smart management of water distribution networks requires the infrastructure to be operated with high efficiency. For many years the hydraulic modelling of water distribution networks has been conditioned by the scarce availability of quality data but the technological advances contributed to overcome this drawback. The present work describes the research activity carried out about water distribution network modelling, focusing on model construction and calibration. For this purpose, WaterNetGen, an extension of the Epanet hydraulic simulation software, has been used. EPANET simulation model assumes that the required water demand is always fully satisfied regardless the pressure (Demand Driven Analysis - DDA), while WaterNetGen has a new solver assuming that the required water demand is only fully satisfied if the pressure conditions are adequate (Pressure Driven Analysis - PDA). A comparison between the software outputs is the starting point for a new method of allocating and distributing water demand and water losses along the network, leading to model results closer to the measurements obtained in the real network. The case study is the water distribution network of the municipality of Nicotera, in Southern Italy.

Defining criteria for correct distribution of water resource is a common engineering problem. Stringent regulations on environmental impacts underline the need for sustainable management and planning of this resource usage, which is sensitive to many parameters. Optimization models are often used to deal with these problems, identifying the optimal configuration of a Water Distribution Network (WDN) in terms of minimizing an appropriate function propotional to he construction cost of the WDN. Generally, this cost function increases as the distance between the source-user connection increases, therefore in minimum cost optimization models is important to identify minimum source-user paths compatible with the orography. In this direction, the methodology presented in the present work proposes a useful approach to find minimum-length paths on surfaces, which moreover respect suitable hydraulic constraints and are therefore representative of reliable gravity water pipelines. The application of the approach is presented in a real case in Calabria.