Development of a Method to Reduce Damages by Pipe Failures

A water distribution system should be constructed reasonably to supply water for the customer with proper quality and pressure as demands at nodes fluctuate with time. Also it should be reliable to minimize undesirable effects on the customer when various accidents happen such as pipe failures. A new method is presented here to reduce damages by pipe failures. For the work, two methods, namely, the method for estimating practical extent of damage by pipe failures and for estimating water distribution reliability, are adopted to analyze a water distribution system and to explore the damage reduction by pipe failures. As the results from the analysis of the model, the damage can be reduced effectively by increasing durability of each pipe in minimum cutsets according to the order of priority. The suggested method was applied to the Cherry-Hill network to verify its applicability.