Challenge
Yorkshire Water (YW) manages 31,000km of clean water network in the UK providing 1.24 billion litres of potable water each day.
A principal regulatory challenge is the reduction of leakage within the network. Inflowmatix was approached to help with this challenge – in areas prone to bursts and leaks.
One of these district metered areas (DMA’s) was Fox Street. Fox Street is a pressure man aged area of Sheffield controlled through a PRV. The area is largely residential, with some light industrial users.
As this area had a moderate burst and leak rate, YW deployed a number of high frequency (HF) InflowSense™ ‘Edge’ devices to get a better understanding of the underlying issues within the DMA.
Solution
Over a number of days our Cumulative Pressure Induced Stress (CPIS™) metric showed a significant increase in dynamic activity indicating a prelude to a burst.
In parallel with this, the existing YW alerting system of night line usage indicated there was a probable burst due to increase in demand. The burst was fixed and back ground pressure returned to normal. However an unsteady state was still indicated by the underlying CPIS™ metric.
Collaboratively a further step of source localisation was undertaken which highlighted secondary issues with the PRV. Further investigation observed the PRV to be hammering and hunting for optimal pressure.
Adjustments to the PRV were completed and checked against a standard 1-min interval pressure logger.
Results
Post field adjustments, further inspection using 128s/s summary data, raw data downloads and CPIS™ metric confirmed the PRV behaviour remained unstable with a 5 metre pressure variation over 0.2 second period being observed. This concluded the PRV was oversized and needed replacement.
Without the detailed insight from the Inflowmatix high frequency InflowSense™ ‘Edge’ devices, CPIS™ and InflowSys™ platform the root cause of the problem would have been undiscovered and the instability within the network would have remained.
