An energy assessment on the water distribution network with deficient data quality: A case study in Samutprakarn, Thailand

The water distribution system is one of the highest consumptive uses of energy. Accordingly, energy efficiency is a major concern in modern Water Distribution Networks (WDNs), and therefore, an energy assessment of WDNs is advantageous. An energy assessment employs the energy balance approach which is applied on the hydraulic model simulation result. Initially, the energy into the system (E_in) is transformed into three energy elements: 1) the energy delivered to water users (E_U), 2) the energy exiting the system in a water loss form (E_wl), and 3) the energy lost due to friction (E_f).

The model parameters must be calibrated to be representative of the real system before calculating the energy balance. It is typical in a developing country that data measurements in WDNs contain some missing data or incorrectly measured data. It is, therefore, challenging to find the hydraulic model parameters including the emitter coefficient, demand patterns, elevations and pipe roughness under this condition.

In this research, we demonstrate a model calibration method on a WDN containing a large amount of missing data and incorrectly measured data. A case study in this research is Samut Prakan trunk main network, Metropolitan Waterworks Authority, Thailand.An optimisation routine is also utilised to find some of the parameters.

The energy assessment is also performed on an hourly basis in addition to a traditional daily basis in order to evaluate the energy loss in each hour. According to data of March 2018, it has been found that E_in, which equals 36,920 kW-h/day (100%) has been converted to E_U 16,914 kW-h/day (45.8%), E_wl is equal to 1039 kW-h/day (2.8%), and E_f is up to 18,967 kW-h/day (51.4%), indicating that pipe size should be increased to reduce E_f. This result shows a clear benefit of the developed software.

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