Sustainable Leakage Monitoring Systems for Water Distribution Pipeline Networks

An estimated 26.5 million m(3) (approximate to 20%) of treated water is lost through leakages from water distribution pipelines every day in the U.S., and this loss is expected to grow in the coming years as a result of deteriorating infrastructure. Over the past few years, there has been a strong research focus on developing and deploying permanent pipeline leakage monitoring systems that will detect and locate significant leakages in near real-time. While novel non-invasive, cyber-physical algorithms are emerging to enable continuous system-wide leakage monitoring, their life cycle cost are yet to be thoroughly investigated. In an attempt to address this knowledge gap, this paper presents a framework for estimating the life cycle costs of network-wide leakage monitoring systems, and demonstrates it using a benchmark water distribution system layout. This paper identifies the hardware and software needs of a surface vibration-based leak detection technique and elucidates its operational scheme that will impact the life cycle cost for reliable leakage monitoring of water distribution systems. The approach and the demonstration presented in this paper will inform how sustainable (i.e., cost wise) and feasible the studied leakage detection system is and as a whole, this paper will be informative to water utility owners.