Caroline Blocher

Design and control of intelligent water networks with dynamically configurable network topologies

Started: October 2016

Supervisor: Dr Ivan Stoianov

Industry Partner: Cla-Val

Description of Research

The growing water demand in urban areas is forcing water utilities to take a more proactive approach towards background leakage management and burst detection. In addition, water utilities are facing more stringent regulatory requirements and performance-related financial penalties and incentives that include interruptions of supply to customers. Therefore, reliable and fast failure diagnosis tools are urgently needed to enable a cost efficient and sustainable operation of urban water systems. Caroline’s project aims to develop new methods for the reliable diagnosis of background leakage, bursts and other failures in a new generation of dynamically adaptive water supply networks. The project will consider data-driven and hydraulic model-based approaches. The proposed methods will be motivated and validated by the design and execution of an extensive experimental programme.