Using pump as turbine in urban water networks to control, monitor and simulate water processes remotely.

---

Morteza Ahmadifar, Sarah Bahari Derakhshan

Tuesday 30 june 2015

14:20 - 14:35h at Africa (level 0)

Themes: (T) Water engineering, (ST) Hydraulic machinery and industrial flows

Parallel session: 6F. Engineering - Instrumentation

---

Leakage is one of the most important problems that drinking water networks face which first reason is high pressure existence. There are many approaches to control this excess pressure, which using pressure reducing valves (PRVs) or reducing pipe diameter are ones. In the other hand, Pumps are using energy to supply needed pressure in distribution networks but excess pressure are made in some branches due to topology problems and water networks’ variables, therefore using PRVs will be inevitable. Pumps as Turbine (called PAT in this article) which are easily available and also effective sources of reducing the equipment cost in small hydro-power plants can be substituted for PRVs. Urban areas of developing countries are facing increasing in area. These cities need wider water networks which make it hard to predict and control. Using more energy and therefore more pollution, slower repairing services, more user dissatisfaction and more leakage are these networks’ serious problems. Therefore more effective systems are needed to monitor and act in these complicated networks than what is used now. In this article an approach is proposed: Using Pumps as Turbine (PAT) to produce energy for remote valves and sensors on drinking water networks. These sensors can be used to determine the discharge, pressure, water quality and other important network characteristics. With the help of remote valves pipeline discharge can be controlled so Instead of wasting excess hydraulic pressure which may be destructive in some cases, obtaining extra pressure and producing clean electricity used by remote instruments is this articles’ goal. Furthermore due to increasing the area of network there is unwanted high pressure in some critical points which is not destructive but lowering the pressure results to longer lifetime for pipeline network without users’ dissatisfaction. This strategy proposed in this article, leads to use PAT widely for pressure containment and produce energy needed for remote valves and sensors like what happens in supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems which make it easy for us to monitor, receive data from urban water cycle and make any needed changes in discharge and pressure of pipeline easily and remotely.