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Operational benefits and efficiencies generated using prevalent water industry methods and techniques are becoming more difficult to achieve; as demonstrated by English and Welsh water companies' static position with regards the economic level of leakage. Water companies are often unaware of network incidents such as burst pipes or low pressure events until they are reported by customers; and therefore use reactive strategies to manage the effects of these events. It is apparent that new approaches need to be identified and applied to promote proactive network management if potential operational productivity and standards of service improvements are to be realised. This paper describes how measured flow and pressure data from instrumentation deployed in a water distribution network was automatically gathered, checked, analysed and presented using recently developed techniques to generate apposite information about network performance. The work demonstrated that these technologies can provide early warning, and hence additional time to that previously available, thereby creating opportunity to proactively manage a network; for example to minimise the negative impact on standards of customer service caused by unplanned events such as burst pipes. Each method, applied individually, demonstrated improvement on current industry processes. Combined application resulted in further improvements; including quicker and more localised burst main location. Future possibilities are explored, from which a vision of seamless integration between such technologies emerges to enable proactive management of distribution network events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Leakage from pipes transporting liquids, such as water distribution networks or oil transport pipelines is a major problem throughout the world. One promising approach to identifying leakage points has been to analyse the reflections from a pressure wave caused by shutting a valve, using a wavelet to filter the data followed by a cepstrum to extract the reflection points. The work reported here takes this technique and applies it to a laboratory based pipe test facility comprising 90m of nominal 4″ (79mm) plastic pipe, typical of that currently installed in water distribution systems. A novel device is also reported for the creation of the water hammer pulse and the acquisition of the reflected signals from the pipe system. Results show that the signal analysis approach combined with the device is able to identify leaks in the large diameter pipe to an accuracy of better than one quarter of a metre. As the position of the leak is moved, the peak in the processed result moves to reflect this. When the four thirds power of the amplitude of the processed peak was plotted against leak rate, a straight line was produced, indicating that not only position, but also leak rate can be identified using this technique. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]