Jorge Alejandro DELGADO-AGUIÑAGA, Universidad del Valle de México, Mexico
The monitoring of water pipelines has become more and more important worldwide due to the importance of saving drinking water. Unfortunately, about 40 percent of the water is lost due to leaks that are caused by accidents, normal aging of the pipes, among others. The scientific community has developed techniques to face this problem from different perspectives. However, most of them have been only evaluated in controlled situations and/or in laboratory scenarios. This work presents a successful leak diagnosis for a real pipeline. The diagnosis was performed on the water pipeline West 5 located in Guadalajara City, Mexico, which is supervised by Inter-Municipal System of Potable Water and Sewage (SIAPA). Herein, the author tries to highlight those difficulties that arise when facing a real leak problem, especially if the fluid line is not monitored online or records of the flow rate and pressure are not available. By considering that only one leak is present in the system and by using the pipeline configuration information provided by the SIAPA staff, a discrete-time extended Kalman filter, used as a state observer, was designed to isolate the leak. The final decision about the leak location was based on the results of four different database analyses in which three showed a similar tendency. So, we can conclude that the implementation of a monitoring system can help reducing the waste of water which in turn positively impacts in the reduction of the overuse of the natural water resources.
Mots clés : water resources|sustainability|youth initiatives
A105349JD