Pressure Standards in Water Distribution Systems: Reflection on Current Practice with Consideration of Some Unresolved Issues

AbstractPressure standards assist in the design of water distribution systems and the assessment of their performance. Although exact thresholds are sometimes rather vague, unusually high and low pressures are widely understood to increase costs and put systems at risk from events like pipe bursts at the high-pressure end to the risk of contaminant intrusion or poor firefighting conditions at the low-pressure end. Interestingly, because the definition of what conditions constitute acceptable pressures differs around the world, a delivery pressure might be considered acceptable in some regions and unacceptable in others. But if a wider range of system conditions is considered, including transient events, an interesting question arises as to what exactly the standards might mean and how violations should be evaluated. Specifically, what kinds of pressure transgressions are most crucial to system performance and economics and what kinds are merely inconvenient? Certainly the issue of evaluating consequences ...