Trunk Network Rehabilitation for Resilience Improvement and Energy Recovery in Water Distribution Networks

Water distribution networks (WDNs) are designed to meet water demand with minimum implementation costs. However, this approach leads to poor long-term results, since system resilience is also minimal, and this requires the rehabilitation of the network if the network is expanded or the demand increases. In addition, in emergency situations, such as pipe bursts, large areas will suffer water shortage. However, the use of resilience as a criterion for WDN design is a difficult task, since its economic value is subjective. Thus, in this paper, it is proposed that trunk networks (TNs) are rehabilitated when considering the generation of electrical energy using pumps as turbines (PATs) to compensate for an increase of resilience derived from increasing pipe diameters. During normal operation, these micro-hydros will control pressure and produce electricity. When an emergency occurs, a by-pass can be used to increase network pressure. The results that were obtained for two hypothetical networks show that a small increase in TN pipe diameters is sufficient to significantly improve the resilience of the WDN. In addition, the value of the energy produced surpasses the investment that is made during rehabilitation.