A Single Water Pipeline Design Considering Pressure-Dependent Consumptions: A New Perspective

Current design techniques for water installations are based on pressure-independent consumption. However, certain types of consumption depend on pressure, most notably water leakages, which occur in all water distribution systems. All water installations are prone to water leakages. To mitigate this issue during the design stage of water pipelines, manuals and local regulations recommend a percentage of water losses for sizing pipelines and using them with pressure-independent consumption. This research develops a practical procedure for sizing single water pipelines by considering the effect of pressure-dependent consumption, as in actual pipelines. The findings of this research offer water utilities a new perspective on pipeline design, which is essential for developing new tools to create digital twins. A new methodology for designing pipe diameters is developed in this research. A single pipeline, 2000 m long, is used for the analysis with an emitter coefficient of 0.00829 m3/s/m0.5. The proposed methodology focuses on calculating energy losses to maintain the required minimum pressure in the system. A sensitivity analysis is conducted on key parameters such as the emitter coefficient, absolute roughness, and the resistance coefficient of a regulating valve. The results of the proposed methodology are compared with the current design (using pressure-independent consumption), revealing differences of up to 28% in calculating water losses.