Pressure transfer modeling for an urban water supply system based on Pearson correlation analysis

Abstract

This paper presents an approach to modeling the water pressure transfer among nodes in an urban water supply network for the purpose of pressure control. The network is divided into different sub-networks based on the Pearson correlation analysis of the nodal pressure measurements. The Pearson correlation analysis is performed to find out the set of nodes, whose water pressures are highly correlated, and thus a corresponding sub-network is formulated. As a case study, 47 sub-networks are recognized for a region with an area of 250 km2 and 77 nodes in total. For each sub-network, a linear model is constructed to quantify the pressure transfer. The output of the model is the pressure estimate for the node of our interest which is called the center node. The rest of the nodes in the sub-network are called the correlated nodes of the center node, and the pressure measurements at the correlated nodes constitute the input to the model. The average relative error of the model is less than 3%. A pressure regulating method based on the model is proposed and tested numerically.