A Novel Procedure for Minimizing the Volume of Water Tanks in Water Supply Systems

Abstract

Due to the complexity of calculating the minimum required volume of water tanks and the associated regime of pumping water into the tank depending on the consumption pattern in the water supply systems, finding the functional dependence of these variables is a complex process. The main idea of this paper was to provide a methodology for the calculation of the minimum water tank volume considering all input variables, which could be used in a simple and applicable way in everyday water supply management and engineering. As a final product, a desktop application TankOPT was developed that is easy to run and use on a PC with a user-friendly interface for data entry (data on maximum daily consumption and the pattern of daily water consumption). A software solution was created based on a numerical model that simplifies the usual manual calculations using known spreadsheet software and solves this problem. The solution was determined with combinations of the start and duration of water pumping in the water tank, for which the minimum required volume of the tank is obtained. JavaScript programming language was used to create the app. The use and operation of the application are shown through two hypothetical examples.