Modelling daily water consumption through potential curves. Disaggregating apparent and real losses

Abstract

This paper presents a model, based on potential curves, that describes the behaviour of the inverse of the daily cumulated frequency of the flows provided to a District Metered Area (DMA). The model has two terms, the first corresponds to the variable consumption due to the aggregation of demand patterns of consumers. The evolution of this term presents periodic behaviours with annual and weekly frequency. An extreme drought episode that affected Catalunya, reduced this parameter 19%. A second term presents exponential behaviour in its evolution and includes the real leakage. The leakage disaggregation together with the billing information allows the estimation of the apparent loses, 14.89% in the case study. The difficulty of estimating the parameters in a potential model, a complex problem of optimization, is simplified by applying mathematical moments. Hence, daily parameters become a linear relation of the daily moments that allows their algebraic operation.