Ayman S Mosallam
Abstract
The major challenge for engineers is to restore lifeline services such as the water, gas, transportation, and electric power networks after natural or man-made events. Rapid detection of damage caused by natural and manmade hazards enables an efficient and effective emergency response minimizing human and property losses as well as societal disruption. Techniques that could be used to provide early warning, damage detection and assessment of water and wastewater systems are presented. This paper focuses on water supply networks with a demonstration of a monitoring system consisting of a wireless network of power-efficient sensors for a rapid identification of the extent and location of pipe damage immediately after a disastrous event. The highlight of this paper lies in taking advantage of sharply transient change in hydraulic parameters such as the water head due to the damage, and in verifying the simulation result by experiments. The result suggests that a simple inverse analysis can locate the damage in a pipe segment between two neighboring sensors among the pervasively installed along a pipe at which the absolute values of water head are observed to be local maxima. Separate experiment and analysis show that the sharp transient change in water head in the pipe flow induces a correspondingly sharp change in the acceleration of pipe vibration. This fact is used for damage identification in this study.
Keywords
SCADA,
Disaster Mitigation,
Wastewater Network, Infrastructure.
