Pressure gauge network design for leakage detection in water distribution systems using a combination of the pressure residual vector method and the entropy concept

The present study proposed an algorithm to design a pressure gauge network in a water distribution system by employing the entropy concept in the pressure residual vector method. Firstly, the temporal pattern of water consumption was determined by collecting real-time information through 39 automatic electromechanical water meters. The observational process was performed over 1 year, and hourly statistical parameters were calculated for the log-normal probability density function. Afterwards, imposing the synthetic leakage in each pipe, determining the average entropy of water head variations in the nodes, and performing a combinatorial optimization process, a pressure gauge network (PGN) in a WDS was suggested. The proposed procedure of designing a PGN was tested for both regular and irregular WDS at different leakage parameters (pressure exponents 0.5, 1.0, and 1.5, and emitter coefficient between 0 and 0.8 m3/s). It was observed that the entropy content does not increase significantly after a convincing number of pressure gauges, which can be considered the required number of pressure gauges in the PGN. Furthermore, the monitoring time required to obtain 70% of the entropy content of the water head was about 40 h. However, the time to get 80% of the entropy content had to increase by 80 h, which severely impairs the method's efficiency.