Bruno Melo Brentan

Federal University of Minas Gerais | UFMG ·  Departamento de Engenharia Hidráulica e Recursos Hídricos (EHR)

RESUMO: Esta pesquisa contextualiza-se na necessidade de expandir, eficientemente, a capacidade de redes de distribuição de água devido ao aumento populacional, crescimento da mancha urbana e verticalização das cidades, em países do mundo todo. No entanto, quando se aumenta a demanda nas redes de abastecimento, normalmente, a operação hidráulica do...

Leakages in distribution networks reach more than 30% of the water supplied, entailing important risks for the water infrastructure with water contamination issues. Therefore, it is necessary to develop new methods to mitigate the amount of water wastes. This study proposes to seek new sources of information that can help for a more sustainable wat...

A reliable short-term forecasting model is fundamental to manage a water distribution system properly. In the latest years, a plethora of methods have been proposed by the scientific community, ranging from classic naive methods to the more sophisticated statistical and machine learning models. Among several methods, neural networks gained particul...

Nowadays, drinking water demand forecasting has become fundamental to efficiently manage water distribution systems. With the growth of accessible data and the increase of available computational power, the scientific community has been tackling the forecasting problem, opting often for a data-driven approach with considerable results. However, the...

Sustainable management of water resources is a key challenge nowadays and in the future. Water distribution systems have to ensure fresh water for all users in an increasing demand scenario related to the long-term effects due to climate change. In this context, a reliable short-term water demand forecasting model is crucial for the optimal managem...

As redes de distribuição de água constituem um dos maiores investimentos na implantação de um sistema de distribuição de água. Desta forma, a elaboração de um projeto com ótima relação custo/benefício se faz necessária para sua viabilização. Isto é feito através da busca por tubulações cujos diâmetros permitam atender os consumidores com quantidade...

Os vazamentos nas redes de distribuição de água geram perdas físicas e monetárias, além de gerar riscos as infraestruturas urbanas. Por isso, detectar vazamentos de forma rápida e automática é um passo importante para evitar maiores comprometimentos. Esse artigo apresenta uma metodologia para detectar vazamentos por meio dos dados de monitoramento...

Sustainable management of water resources is a key challenge for the well-being and security of current and future society worldwide. In this regard, water utilities have to ensure fresh water for all users in a demand scenario stressed by climate change along with the increase in the size of cities. Dealing with anomalies, such as leakages and pip...

Leakages in water distribution networks (WDNs) can affect pressure, flow and tank levels of the entire or a large part of the network. Statistical correlation computed between records of pressure sensors monitoring network nodes aids the detection and localisation of such leaks. This opens the possibility to work with water network databases, where...

The deterioration of water distribution infrastructure over the years, associated with an increase in demand and seasonal droughts can lead to an intermittent operation of the system, as the consumers cannot be supplied with a minimum pressure. The lack of investments to rehabilitate the system can be limited, and in this scenario, the intermittent...

Short-term forecasting of water demand is a crucial process for managing efficiently water supply systems. This paper proposes to develop a novel graph convolutional recurrent neural network (GCRNN) to predict time series of water demand related to some water supply systems or district metering areas that belong to the same geographical area. The a...

Water Distribution Networks (WDNs) are responsible for the majority of the costs in a water supply system. Thus, it is reasonable to carefully evaluate the possible interventions to achieve the one with the best cost benefit. Usually, WDN's projects are designed for a life cycle of 20 years, but many systems are already operating longer than this,...

Water demand increases in urban zones, and water scarcity is associated with maintenance problems, such as leakage and pipe ageing, which inevitably lead to complex water distribution systems (WDS) management. In this scenario, intermittent operation emerges as an alternative for system operation. This is not the most desirable solution from a soci...

The digital transformation of water utilities is not optional anymore but the scope of digitalization certainly differs from one company to another. However, even for small utilities or utilities with limited budgets, there are plenty of options for creating value based on digitalization. This paper explores the steps taken in the city of Pamplona,...

A suitable strategy for pressure sensor placement in water distribution systems allows water managers and engineers for better monitoring and controlling of the infrastructure. Sensor placement problem is often addressed by optimization techniques able to deal with its combinatorial nature. This paper focuses on such a question from the innovative...

To detect contaminant intrusion and, in general, to assess quality problems in their water distribution systems, water utilities need quality sensors that continuously measure, directly from the network, conductivity, PH, concentration of different substances, and other related parameters. Due to the nature of the objectives involved, the decision...

Given the growth of urban population, water distribution networks (WDNs) are stressed and may lose hydraulic performance while supplying citizens. WDNs should be modified by civil engineering interventions such as water network rehabilitation, aimed at recovering the originally designed hydraulic performance. In this work, a set of expansion scenar...

The design of district metered areas (DMA) in potable water supply systems is of paramount importance for water utilities to properly manage their systems. Concomitant to their main objective, namely deliver quality water to consumers, the benefits include leakage reduction and prompt reaction in cases of natural or malicious contamination events....

The security of water distribution systems has become the subject 8 of an increasing volume of research over the last decade. Data analysis and 9 machine learning are linked to hydraulic and quality modelling for improving 10 the capacity of water utilities to save lives when faced with the contamina-11 tion of water networks. This research applies...

Water distribution system monitoring is currently carried out using advanced real-time control technologies to achieve a higher operational efficiency. Data analysis techniques can be implemented for condition estimation, which are crucial tools for managing, developing, and operating water networks using the monitored flow rate and pressure data a...

Water distribution is an important service due to its economic, social and health purpose. Therefore, a continuous supply is required to maintain the consumers satisfied. However, emergency scenarios of water scarcity, caused by recurrent or exceptional droughts, can impair the supply, forcing its operation to be intermittent. This operation has cl...

Nowadays, Pump as Turbine (PAT) technology is broadly accepted as a proper renewable generation tool, especially in small capacities. PAT plant design is dependent on the hydraulic characteristic of the site. Flow measurement devices are not widely used in water systems and average values are estimated to be used in the design procedure, which can...

Equitable distribution of water is a growing source of worry, and concerns water systems’ managers as water-stressed areas steadily increase and situations of water scarcity are becoming more frequent. The problem goes beyond just the water sector and globally affects many countries’ economies since water resources have multiple uses (i.e., power g...

To detect contaminant intrusion and, in general, to assess quality problems in their water distribution systems, water utilities need quality sensors that continuously measure, directly from the network, conductivity, PH, concentration of different substances, and other related parameters. Due to the nature of the objectives involved, the decision...

O consumo de energia representa cerca de 90% dos custos operacionais da distribuição de água. Desta forma, ações de eficientização das estações elevatórias, como substituição de conjuntos motobombas, limpeza de adutoras e uso de inversores de frequência são comumente estudados como forma de redução de gastos. O consumo de energia está diretamente r...

The implementation of expansion projects of water networks supplying growing cities is deemed to be a complex decision-making problem involving both technical aspects and expert knowledge. Management and control processes must rely on experts in the field whose know-how must be coupled with techniques able to deal with the natural subjectivity that...

Chlorine demand as a disinfectant for water utility impacts on unintended energy consumption from electrolysis manufacture; thus, diminishing the chlorine consumption also reduces the environmental impact and energy consumption. Problems of disinfectant distribution and uniformity in Water Distribution Networks (WDN) are associated with the exponen...

The current paper proposes a novel methodology for near-real time burst location and sizing in water distribution systems (WDS) by means of Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP), a class of artificial neural network (ANN). The proposed methodology can be systematized in four steps: (1) construction of the pipe-burst database, (2) problem formulation and ANN...

Valve control has been widely used for reducing pressure and leakage in water distribution systems. However, the optimized 6 conditions often change the water flow paths and increase residence times, thus turning pressure control and water quality into conflicting 7 objectives. The current paper aims at the development and discussion of a new metho...

In order to form commitments of the Paris Agreement member countries and an understandable system of their control, it is necessary to understand how effectively the existing infrastructure for providing human life activity in the industrialized world, focused on a high carbon type of economy is used efficiently, and what has the potential to reduc...

Service quality and efficiency of urban systems have been dramatically boosted by various high technologies for real-time monitoring and remote control, and have also gained privileged space in water distribution. Monitored hydraulic and quality parameters are crucial data for developing planning, operation and security analyses in water networks,...

To satisfy their main goal, namely providing quality water to consumers, water distribution networks (WDNs) need to be suitably monitored. Only well designed and reliable monitoring data enables WDN managers to make sound decisions on their systems. In this belief, water utilities worldwide have invested in monitoring and data acquisition systems....

The implementation of expansion projects of water networks supplying growing cities is deemed to be a complex decision-making problem involving both technical aspects and expert knowledge. Management and control processes must rely on experts in the field whose know-how must be coupled with techniques able to deal with the natural subjectivity that...

The knowledge of hydraulic parameters in water distribution networks can indicate problems in real time, such as pipe bursts, small leakages, increase in pipe roughness and illegal connections. However, an accurate indication relies on the quantity and quality of the data acquired, i.e., the number of sensors used to monitor the network and their l...

The optimization of pumping stations operation in water distribution networks has been largely studied, especially with the development of speed drivers, which allowed the machines to adjust the hydraulic power inserted to the system according to the demand requirements. Although this approach results in high benefits, the original characteristics...

Water networks are spatially dispersed, easily accessible, and vulnerable to contaminating intrusions. If contamination is detected too late, then damage to the population may be irreversible. For the hard task of optimal sensor placement, this work presents a multi-objective approach that is combined with post-processing methods for a Pareto front...

Agent-based algorithms, based on the collective behavior of natural social groups, exploit innate swarm intelligence to produce metaheuristic methodologies to explore optimal solutions for diverse processes in systems engineering and other sciences. Especially for complex problems, the processing time, and the chance to achieve a local optimal solu...

Os sistemas de abastecimento de água são fundamentais para o desenvolvimento socioeconômico de cidades. Durante muito tempo, seu planejamento e operação eram focados no atendimento da demanda. Entretanto, essa prática não atende às necessidades atuais de uso racional dos recursos naturais. Assim, nos últimos anos, o problema se tornou mais complexo...

Nowadays, optimal sensor placement (OSP) for leakage detection in water distribution networks is a lively field of research, and a challenge for water utilities in terms of network control, management and maintenance. How many sensors to install and where to install them are crucial decisions to make for those utilities to reach a trade-off between...

Offshore floating hybrid wind and wave energy is a young technology yet to be scaled up. A way to reduce the total costs of the energy production process in order to ensure competitiveness in the sustainable energy market is to maximize the farm's efficiency. To do so, an energy generation and costs calculation model was developed with the objectiv...

A large volume of the water produced for public supply is lost in the systems between sources and consumers. An important-in many cases the greatest-fraction of these losses are physical losses, mainly related to leaks and bursts in pipes and in consumer connections. Fast detection and location of bursts plays an important role in the design of ope...

The conversion of tropical forests to human land-use threatens biodiversity conservation and the delivery of many ecosystem services, especially water-related ecosystem services. In these landscapes, many investments have been made to restore native forests and recover hydrological processes lost by deforestation. Rainfall interception is a key hyd...

This work presents a multi-criteria-based approach to automatically select specific non-dominated solutions from a Pareto front previously obtained using multi-objective optimization to find optimal solutions for pump control in a water supply system. Optimal operation of pumps in these utilities is paramount to enable water companies achieving ene...

Integrated management of water supply systems with efficient use of natural resources requires optimization of operational performances. Dividing the water supply networks into small units, so-called district metered areas (DMAs), is a strategy that allows the development of specific operational rules, responsible for improving the network performa...

Os sistemas de distribuição de água são considerados vulneráveis a ataques químicos por sua dispersão geográfica, de fácil acesso e por gerarem danos irreversíveis a sociedade abastecida em caso de contaminação. Com isso, este estudo busca melhorar a qualidade da segurança das redes de distribuição de água por meio da alocação ótima de sensores de...

As redes de distribuição de água (RDA) apresentam diversos pontos vulneráveis devido a sua grande abrangência e os variados pontos de acesso à rede, sendo, portanto, passível de contaminação acidental ou intencional. Buscando garantir a qualidade da água que é distribuída, sensores de monitoramento de qualidade têm sido instalados ao longo das rede...

O desenvolvimento de algoritmos de detecção de eventos de contaminação em sistemas de distribuição de água, tornou-se um dos tópicos mais desafiadores nos últimos tempos. São necessários sistemas de alerta de contaminantes, o que requer implantação de sensores e sistemas avançados em análise de dados, tornando possível a detecção de mudanças nos pa...

O abastecimento de água insere-se como infraestrutura fundamental para o desenvolvimento seguro das cidades, tornando a eficiência no controle da operação dos sistemas e a agilidade na detecção e solução dos problemas fatores essenciais para o adequado atendimento da população. Este trabalho visa estimar localização de eventos anômalos previamente...

O conceito de sistemas de abastecimento de água inteligentes é concernente ao conceito moderno de cidades inteligentes (smart cities), que envolve novos paradigmas de gestão e operação de infraestruturas urbanas, objetivando sua máxima eficiência e funcionalidade. Embora o conceito possa ser compreendido com facilidade, o campo de estudo dessa nova...

Epidemiology-based models have shown to have successful adaptations to deal with challenges coming from various areas of Engineering, such as those related to energy use or asset management. This paper deals with urban water demand, and data analysis is based on an Epidemiology tool-set herein developed. This combination represents a novel framewor...

Prediction models have become essential for the improvement of decision-making processes in public management and, particularly, for water supply utilities. Accurate estimation often needs to solve multi-measurement, mixed-mode and space-time problems, typical of many engineering applications. As a result, accurate estimation of real world variable...

O dimensionamento de redes de distribuição de água (RDAs) é feito para que as restrições operacionais de velo- cidade e pressão se mantenham dentro de limites que garantam a eficiência operacional. Assim, buscam-se as tubulações de menor custo para que essas condições sejam satisfeitas. Entretanto, ao adotar essa prática, ou- tras características d...

A poluição dos corpos d’água ainda é um problema grave uma vez que grande parte da disposição dos resíduos gerados pelas atividades humana está neles, pondo em risco o abastecimento da comunidade. Portanto, é importante analisar e parametrizar modelos de qualidade da água, assim é possível avaliar o impacto desses poluentes com segurança. Uma variá...

The strategy of system identification can help the development of data- driven models of water distribution networks (WDN). The use of the available a priori knowledge is important to better design the models and to know their limitations. For physical elements of the WDN, which hydraulic laws are well known and can be used for modelling by gray-bo...

The use of CFD models associated with real models is always useful to better understand the hydraulic phenomena and allows finding new applications to existing methods. In addition, the results of the model are generally faster and with lower costs. In contrast, the results of the real model allow the validation of the results of the model. Whereas...

Several consequences can arise from unexpected terrorist actions such as an attack by chemical into the drinking water distribution system. To investigate possible threats of chemical contamination in the system to detect early events and actions can help water distribution network operators making assertive decisions. This work presents a model ca...

Water Distribution Networks (WDNs) modelling is an important tool for efficient operation and design, where the hydraulic simulations are used to establish the optimal conditions. However, there are uncertainties in this modelling process, especially on nodal demand and pipe roughness, which can be surpassed through an efficient calibration process...

The contamination of a water distribution network (WDS) leads to several problems in public health, requiring the use of sensors to detect the presence of abnormal chemical compounds as soon as possible. The study of the strategic location of sensors enables the optimization of network security. Therefore, the objective of this work is to use the E...

This contribution focuses on the problem of optimal pump scheduling, a fundamental element in pursuing operation optimization of water distribution systems. A combined approach of multi-objective optimization and multi-criteria analysis is herein suggested to first find the Pareto front of non-dominated solutions and then to rank them based on a se...

Optimal management operations of water distribution systems improve water utility performance by reducing costs and resource waste. Obviously, the more accurate the water demand forecasting model, the better the operation. Classical artificial neural networks (ANNs) use external variables (e.g. weather and social variables) as inputs for their wate...

Lighting, heating, and air conditioning systems are instances of how electricity use at buildings is of key importance for occupants comfort and well-being. Since the electricity can be produced but cannot be stored, for utility companies it is important to reliably forecast energy supply almost in near real-time. Nowadays, smart grid technologies...

The new environmental paradigms imposed by climate change and urbanization processes are leading cities to re-think urban management services. Propelled by technological development and the internet of things, an increasingly smart management of cities has favored the emergence of a new research field, namely the smart city. Included in this new wa...

Water distribution networks (WDNs) are designed to meet water demand with minimum implementation costs. However, this approach leads to poor long-term results, since system resilience is also minimal, and this requires the rehabilitation of the network if the network is expanded or the demand increases. In addition, in emergency situations, such as...

Pressure control is an important feature for reducing leakages in water supply systems, and the use of pressure reducing valves has been well established as an efficient option for this purpose. However, several studies have demonstrated that the energy available on such sites could be used to generate electrical energy, instead of being dissipated...

Water supply utilities need to properly manage their systems to guarantee a quality supply. One way to manage large systems is through division into district metered areas (DMAs). Graph clustering with an unknown number of subdivisions, as in social network theory, has proven highly efficient in this sectorization problem. Several physical and hydr...