Building and Exploiting a Digital Twin for the Management of Drinking Water Distribution NetworksDigital Twins (DTs) are starting to be exploited in water distribution systems as a tool to improve their management and, in the future, they will be crucial for decision making. In this paper, the authors propose several requirements that a DT of a water distribution system should accomplish. However, the development of a DT is a challenge, and a continuous process of adjustments and learning is required. Due to the advantages of having a DT of the water distribution system, during the last years a strategy to build and maintain a DT of the water distribution network of Valencia (Spain) and its Metropolitan Area (1.6 million inhabitants) was developed. This is one of the first DTs of a water utility.The great benefits of their use in the daily operation of the system ensure that they will begin to be habitual in the most advanced smart cities.
Sustainable development has been an idea raised in recent years. The results are related to the improvement and the use of new technologies to maximize efficiency in water management. However, energy consumption has been increasing as a consequence of new management and uses of water. Especially in pressurized water distribution systems, the use of pressure reduction valves (PRVs) increases the water usage efficiency but it decreases the energy consumption efficiency, since the valves dissipate energy that could be recovered. This research presents a proposal of a recovery system based on the installation of pumps used as turbines (PATs). These machines are located in different points of the high-pressure water distribution system in the Valencia Metropolitan System (Spain). An annual estimate of the theoretical recoverable energy as well as the “ideal” pump for each point were proposed. The theoretical recovered energy value was 847,301 kWh/year for a specific analyzed point. Besides, the characteristic curves of the PATs from a selected point were determined, estimating an improvement in the sustainable indexes. The calculus of these green parameters showed that the implementation of this solution caused a reduction in consumed energy of 1.50 kWh/m3.
In urban water supply networks, the demanded flow and the latent leakage flow depend on the available pressure on the user's node. So when due to different circumstances (pipe breakage, pumps detention...) a pressure reduction occurs in the network, the real consumed flow can decrease considerably because the pressure may
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