LOCALISATION OF WATER LEAKAGE FROM WATER SUPPLY NETWORKS BASED ON COMPARING MEASURED AND PROJECTED PRESSURES

Water losses in water supply systems is measured by the difference between the volume of water abstracted at the source/water intake and the volume of water delivered to consumers at the same time. Rational management of water resources imposes the obligation to reduce water losses (leakage). Moreover, in the last two decades the topic of water loss reduction in water supply systems has been considered in the context of climate change adaptation measures. The EU Framework Water Directive prescribes the implementation of the principle of cost recovery from water services, i.e. the realization of profits by public water services providers based on abstracted (not on delivered) water quantities. Since more than 50% of water abstracted for public water supply in the Republic of Croatia is lost, the application of the mentioned principle requires an urgent reduction of water losses in water supply systems. The paper provides a systematic review and calculation patterns of direct and iterative methods for localising water losses based on the comparison of working pressures measured in a water supply system and those predicted by the design solution for the same water supply system. Namely, this method of localizing water leaks in water supply systems can be very attractive for reducing water losses because it is selective, thus avoiding the costs of complete rehabilitation of all suspect pressure sections. In this context, the application of the mentioned methods is shown on the example of a hypothetical symmetrical water supply network, where the calculation forms are implemented in the computer code created in the Python programming language. In conclusion, the paper provides a critical discussion and guidelines for future research.