Practical Estimation of Minimum Night Flow in Water Distribution Networks: Large-scale Application to the City of Patras in Western Greece
- 1University of Patras, Department of Civil Engineering, Patras, Greece
- 2Municipal Enterprise of Water Supply and Sewerage of the City of Patras, Patras, Greece
- 3Dipartimento di Ingegneria Civile, Ambientale ed Architettura, Università degli Studi di Cagliari, Cagliari, Italy
- 4American College of Greece, Deree, School of Business and Economics, Department of Management and International Business, Athens, Greece
Abstract
In the present work we develop and test a non-parametric statistical methodology to obtain point estimates of Minimum Night Flow (MNF) in Water Distribution Networks (WDNs). The methodology constitutes a simplified version of the approach of Serafeim et al. (2021) for confidence interval estimation of background losses in WDNs, that simultaneously analyzes all night flow measurements, producing robust estimates independent of the nominal resolution of the available data.
In addition to being simpler to apply and computationally more efficient, the developed method can be applied to any WDN independent of its size, age and overall condition, its specific geometric characteristics (intensity of altimetry, average diameter etc.), inlet/operating pressures, and the nominal resolution of the flow data.
The effectiveness of the method is tested via a large-scale application to the WDN of the City of Patras in western Greece, which consists of 79 Pressure Management Areas (PMAs) with more than 700 km of pipeline grid. To do so, we use flow data at 1 min temporal resolution, provided by the Municipal Enterprise of Water Supply and Sewerage of the City of Patras, for the 4-month winter period from 01 November 2018 – 28 February 2019, which are progressively averaged to coarser temporal resolutions, in an effort to test the sensitivity of the developed method to the nominal resolution of the data.
The obtained point estimates of MNF are assessed on the basis of the confidence intervals obtained by the approach of Serafeim et al. (2021), highlighting the accuracy and robustness of a simple non-parametric approach in providing MNF point estimates at a minimum of effort.
Acknowledgements
The research work was supported by the Hellenic Foundation for Research and Innovation (H.F.R.I.) under the “First Call for H.F.R.I. Research Projects to support Faculty members and Researchers and the procurement of high-cost research equipment grant” (Project Number: 1162).
References
Serafeim, A.V., G. Kokosalakis, R. Deidda, I. Karathanasi and A. Langousis, (2021) Probabilistic Estimation of Minimum Night Flow in Water Distribution Networks: Large-scale Application to the City of Patras in Western Greece (submitted).
How to cite: Serafeim, A. V., Karathanasi, I., Kokosalakis, G., Deidda, R., and Langousis, A.: Practical Estimation of Minimum Night Flow in Water Distribution Networks: Large-scale Application to the City of Patras in Western Greece, EGU General Assembly 2021, online, 19–30 Apr 2021, EGU21-2235, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu21-2235, 2021.
