Abstract

MARTINEZ-CODINA, Ángela; SAAVEDRA, Casilda; CUETO-FELGUEROSO, Luis  and  GARROTE, Luis. Influence of Pressure on Pipe Breaks in Water Distribution Networks. Tecnol. cienc. agua [online]. 2016, vol.7, n.4, pp.25-39. ISSN 2007-2422.

Frequent pipe breaks are one symptom of the deterioration of water distribution systems. Water managers strive to avoid pipe breaks due to the high economic, social and environmental costs related to them. It has been previously demonstrated that water pressure management may succeed at reducing the probability of occurrence of pipe breaks. In this paper, a methodology that analyzes the influence of water pressure on the probability of occurrence of pipe breaks is proposed. The main objective is to identify the most influential pressure indicators on the probability of occurrence of pipe breaks for a particular network. The methodology compares the cumulative distribution function (CDF) conditioned to pipe breaks to 100 CDFs obtained from random realizations of the unconditional CDF. We argue that the most influential indicators on the probability of occurrence of pipe breaks are those associated with the largest number of rejected null hypotheses in the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test. The methodology has been applied to two districts of Panamá City. It is reasonable to conclude that the indicators that represent the dispersion of the data are the most influential on the probability of pipe breaks.

Keywords : Water supply systems; pipe breaks; bayesian model.