Systematic protection for worst case transient loadings in pipeline systems

Estimating appropriate water demands for designing a distribution system is itself difficult, but the continuously time-varying nature of these demands has the added the potential of creating water hammer problems, challenges that might result, in the worst case, in catastrophic pipeline or system failure. To first identify and then avoid these eventualities, this paper searches a defined set of possible water hammer events in water distribution systems to identify the most severe transient loading and then to search for suitable surge protection strategies. Evolutionary approaches, in particular genetic algorithms and particle swarm optimization, are combined with transient analysis first to identify a set of worst-case loads and then to seek an optimal protection strategy to alleviate the severity of the transient response. This approach shows that not only are loading conditions important when searching for the worst case, but that a proper selection of the system characteristics and surge protection devices are crucial ways of preventing and mitigating transient events.