Aron Negusse Asfaha studied the international course "WAREM - Water Resources Engineering and Management" at the University of Stuttgart from 2016 to 2019. His outstanding master thesis on "Optimal Design of Pressure Measurement for Stochastic Calibration of Water Distribution Hydraulic Models", which has now been awarded by the AQUA Study Award 2020 by the AQUA Foundation, was supervised by PD Dr.-Ing. Sergey Oladyshkin, Institute for Water and Environmental System Modelling and PR in the Cluster of Excellence SimTech. The thesis deals with the calibration problem of water distribution models, which are the key for any analysis, design evaluation or assessment to be performed on water supply pipe networks. His work thus transfers novel approaches, which originate from the research of the Cluster of Excellence SimTech, into practice.
The Foundation
The AQUA Foundation, which was founded in 2000 by Prof. Kobus and Gisa Kobus, is non-profit and dependent. Its purpose is to support the academic education in water-related subjects at the Faculty of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Stuttgart. Study awards for student works are awarded annually. The chairman of the foundation board is Rainer Helmig, member of the SimTech board of directors and PI of the Cluster of Excellence.
AQUA Prize Ceremony 2020
The AQUA Prize Ceremony 2020 is scheduled for July 28th 2020 at 16:00. Please use the following YouTube link to access the livestream: https://youtu.be/xg90ymFAOis.
Summary of the work
This thesis focuses on establishing a meaningful relationship between information gain and the required acceptable model calibration. The calibration of water Distribution (WD) models is key to any analysis, design evaluation or assessment to be carried out on the WD pipe networks. Several calibration procedures have been developed through the years but still much progress needs to be made, to tackle the challenges in water distribution. The extensive costs and time wasted in acquiring measurement (pressure) data for calibration has made the company RBS-wave doubtful of its efficiency since no hard and fast rule exist to govern measurements. Ac-cording to the German standards for gas and water works (DVGW) regulation only a minimum recommended use of pressure measuring instruments are provided. In reference to this number the RBS-wave uses four times as much measuring instruments. This boosted the motivation of this thesis to aim at optimizing the number and location of pressure measuring instruments sufficient to provided calibration within acceptable limits. A tool for probabilistic assessment, within the Bayesian framework was adopted from a previous thesis on which this thesis is based. Hence an assessment on calibrated project of the RBS-wave was carried out to achieve similar calibration results but with less measurement information. This guided the second phase of the thesis where a synthetic distribution network was developed to calibrate and identifying the intentional installed network errors by systematically placing the loggers at nodes were high values of coefficient of variation were expressed. Four scenarios were created and analysed to narrow the gap between the recommended DVGW number of measuring instruments, and the number of instruments used by the RBS-wave to achieve optimal use of instrumentation for measurement.