Simulation of a leak's growth process in water distribution systems based on growth functions

Abstract

Abstract Water loss in water distribution systems is one of the major problems faced by water utilities. The components of water losses should be accurately assessed and their priority should be determined. Generally, water balance analysis is used to quantify different components of water losses and identify the main contributor to high leakage rates. The leak flow rate is assumed to be static within a given calculation period during the calculation of real losses. Errors will inevitably arise during this process. This is mainly due to our limited understanding of a leak's growth process. To overcome this problem, the current work proposes the use of growth functions to represent a leak's growth process and establish a functional relationship between the leak flow rate and the leak duration. A leakage development model is adopted to simulate a leak's growth process and optimize the parameters of growth functions. The results show that the Richards function performs better than other growth functions and its mean absolute percentage error is 15.33%. Furthermore, the growth function could be used to calculate real losses and has the prospect of evaluating the effects of leakage detection.