Software based localisation of leaks in a water supply network

According to international and national standards, the best practice method for monitoring a water supply system is to sectorize it into district metered areas. A district metered area (DMA) is an area with strict hydraulic boundaries within a distribution system with measured inflow into this discrete area. The measured minimum night flow can be compared to a default or to the customer night consumption to calculate water loss. For a supply system with detailed information about the structure, pressure and hydraulic gradients, it is also possible to identify water loss with high reliability using a method of monitoring virtual district metered areas. The presented method was used for upgrading an implemented monitoring strategy for a network in Germany. With this concept the area of a possible leak could be reduced within a virtual DMA to a range of 300 m between the prediction and the real leak only by combining the metered flow values and the calibrated hydraulic model.