Technology And Application Of District Meter Area For Leakage Control Of Water Distribution System

For archiving the aims of enhancing and improving the social and economic sustainable development in urban water supply, The National Stantard, titled as "Stantard of Water Leakage control and assessment in Urban Water Distribution Systems" (CJJ92-2002), required that modern technologies should be applied in practice, such as existing data management, establishing technical files and geographic information system, monitoring water leakage and rehabilitation of pipe networks, and water leakage must be controlled to a level under 12%. Is is important for upgrading management of water supply systems and improving economic efficiency of water utilities. Leakage control of urban water supply system has become an important field of water science and technology, and development of high-tech industrial equipment.The technology of District Meter Area (DMA) is am important technology for water leakage detection and control in Water distribution systems, which has been wildly applied in the world. The principal of the DMA technique is that the water distribution system is divided into number of districts in small scales, and the water supplied into the districts are measured by water meters. The difference between the DMA record and the users' water record would be controlled and analyzed for water leakage management. Particularly, the night flow recorded by the DMA meters should be considered as water leakage flow, under the condition of that there should no water used by users in the district. If the recognized leakage flow is bigger than the regulated level, it must be monitored by pipe sections to find the leakage points and do leakage control by pipe repairs.In this paper, the principals and techniques of DMA are described, and applied to the water supply system in Bashing area of Shanghai Shibei Company. The results of the engineering application show that water loss in the area happened mostly in the DMA districts, with a percentage of 80%. Particularly, The damaging inlet pipes by the deposition of the houses was a big problem for water leakage. Another reason for water loss could be the missing record of the water meters, with a percentage of 20%, in the unhorsed houses. In this study, computerized modeling software was developed for analyzing water flow and pressure distributions in the pipe network, which was used to analyze and forecast the water leakage in the system.The study demonstrated in practice that the DMA method and technology provided goo(?) results for decision making in water leakage control and management, and it gave out a useful demonstration for the use of DMA in the future.