Maurizio Righetti

Free University of Bozen-Bolzano | Unibolzano · Faculty of Science and Technology

The space-and time-averaged velocity profiles in gravel beds show some features that differentiates them from that established in smooth beds, but the obstruction posed by the gravel hampers the experimental measurements below the sediments. To overcome such difficulties, we coupled particle image velocimetry (PIV) with refractive index matching (R...

Short-term hydrological forecasting is crucial for suitable multipurpose water resource management involving water uses, hydrological security, and renewable production. In the Alpine Regions such as South Tyrol, characterized by several small watersheds, quick information is essential to feed the decision processes in critical cases such as flood...

Using the global climate model outputs without any adjustment may bring errors in water resources and climate change investigations. This study tackles the critical issue of bias correction temperature in ERA5-Land reanalysis for 10 ground stations in the northern Italy using 9 machine learning (ML) techniques. Among standalone ML models, XGBoost r...

Short-term hydrological forecasting is crucial for suitable multipurpose water resource management involving water uses, hydrological security, and renewable production. In the Alpine Regions such as South Tyrol, characterized by several small watersheds, quick information is essential to feed the decision processes in critical cases such as flood...

Sustainable use of water and energy sources is a crucial challenge for smart and resilient urban water infrastructure. At this aim, this study presents a methodology for implementing and selecting pumps-as-turbines (PaTs) in water distribution networks (WDNs) to minimise leakage losses and maximise energy recovery. A novel dynamic control algorithm...

Hydropower is commonly considered a renewable energy source. Nevertheless, this does not imply an absence of impacts on the riverine ecosystem, the extent of which is expected to increase in the coming years due to the energy transition from fossil fuels to renewable sources and for the climate change. A common consequence of hydroelectric power ge...

The Arbitrary Lagrangian–Eulerian Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (ALE-SPH) formulation can guarantee stable solutions preventing the adoption of empirical parameters such as artificial viscosity. However, the convergence rate of the ALE-SPH formulation is still limited by the inaccuracy of the SPH spatial operators. In this work, a Weighted Essent...

Funding information Rehabilitation of Water Distribution Systems is a complex task that water companies have to tackle continually to keep high-quality service. The larger and more complex the network, the harder to make decisions about the network maintenance strategy to be implemented. Considering pipe replacement and leak repairing as a strategy...

The current water shortage and energy crises due to climate change, geopolitical problems, and the increasing demand for these resources require considerable efforts to develop new sustainable and efficient solutions. The sector with the most significant impact on water resources and consequently also suffers most from the water shortage is agricul...

The water industry is facing significant challenges due to the effects of climate change and energy crises. To address these issues, the water sector is undergoing a digital transformation, leveraging digital technologies and methods, such as artificial intelligence and smart sensors, to improve sustainable supply, distribution, and treatment of wa...

The constant availability of water from the mountain basins is crucial to feed the hydropower plants that currently represent the most important renewable energy source in many countries, like Italy. The long dry periods that are nowadays registered during the summer periods have imposed the managers of the hydropower plants to operate the machines...

Drinking water demand modelling and forecasting is a crucial task for sustainable management and planning of water supply systems. Despite many short-term investigations, the medium-term problem needs better exploration, particularly the analysis and assessment of meteorological data for forecasting drinking water demand. This work proposes to anal...

Bottom racks made by longitudinal bars are hydraulic structures widely adopted for engineering purposes. In the present paper we revisit the problem of their hydraulic design, analyzing the data obtained from a systematic series of experiments carried out in a laboratory flume. For each run we measured the diverted discharge, the water surface long...

Water demand management is essential for water utilities, which have the critical task of supplying drinking water from water sources to end-users through the distribution network. Therefore, the water utilities have to make decisions for the current and future functioning of the water distribution system. In this context, the artificial intelligen...

The digitalisation of water supply systems is essential to support crucial activities, ranging from the hydraulic modelling and calibration of distribution systems to the optimal planning of renewal measures. Digital Twins is the current challenge that aims to join accurate hydraulic models with Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools that employ a fait...

In this paper, we model and quantify in forecast mode the soil erosion and sediment yields during one of the most destructive flash floods in recent Greek history. The extreme event known as the flash flood of Mandra occurred in the morning hours of November 15th, 2017, with 300 mm of rainfall falling in approximately 13 hours and an estimated retu...

Reservoir sedimentation is a major issue for dam managers and one of the most characteristic off-site effects of soil erosion combined with the stream sediment processes. In this study, we simulate and analyze the sedimentation rates, due to soil erosion and sediment transport, of the Rio di Pusteria hydropower dam in South Tyrol (Italian Alps). Th...

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...

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...

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 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...

Hydraulic machines are currently becoming of interest to enhance the small-scale hydropower potential and perform energy recovery as well. One of the most interesting applications is the use of simple and low-cost turbines in mountain weirs that have not been fully exploited yet. A critical issue in these applications is the risk of strong atmosphe...

This paper deals with the development of a semi-implicit numerical method for the Navier–Stokes equations using the non-linear volumes of fluid (VOF) approach and a semi-Lagrangian scheme for the discretization of the advection contribution based on a high order reconstruction of the velocity field. The VOF approach guarantees high flexibility and...

A reliable short-term forecasting model is fundamental to managing a water distribution system properly. This study addresses the problem of the efficient development of a deep neural network model for short-term forecasting of water consumption in small-scale water supply systems. These aqueducts experience significant fluctuations in their consum...

The ongoing transformation of the electricity market has reshaped the hydropower production paradigm for storage reservoir systems, with a shift from strategies oriented towards maximizing regional energy production to strategies aimed at the revenue maximization of individual systems. Indeed, hydropower producers bid their energy production schedu...

Flash floods, among the most destructive natural hazards, are commonly studied as to their catastrophic power in terms of fatalities, infrastructure damages and economic losses. A devastating aftermath of flash floods, which has not received its much‐deserved attention in literature, is the sizeable and permanent soil loss due to soil erosion and s...

Short-term streamflow forecasting is crucial for many activities including flood risk mitigation, multi-use water management and production planning for hydropower plants. Several studies have shown that data-driven approaches are more suitable for operational forecasting than physics-based models due to the higher flexibility and reproducibility o...

The periodic removal of deposited sediment in Alpine artificial reservoirs can be carried out through the flushing technique, in which the bottom outlets of the dam are opened to let water flow through the gates, eroding, re-suspending and transporting the sediment downstream. However, this reservoir sediment management strategy normally generates...

The present study has the main purpose to experimentally investigate a turbulent momentum jet issued in a basin affected by rotation and in presence of porous obstructions. The experiments were carried out at the Coriolis Platform at LEGI Grenoble (FR). A large and unique set of velocity data was obtained by means of a Particle Image Velocimetry me...

Results of the application of ArcSWAT for the determination of sediment yields in the Gadera river basin (South Tyrol, Italy).

This paper studies the convergence properties of an arbitrary Lagrangian–Eulerian (ALE) Riemann-based SPH algorithm in conjunction with a Weighted Essentially Non-Oscillatory (WENO) high-order spatial reconstruction, in the framework of the DualSPHysics open-source code. A convergence analysis is carried out for Lagrangian and Eulerian simulations...

Modelling heat load is a crucial challenge for the proper management of heat production and distribution. Several studies have tackled this issue at building and urban levels, however, the current scale of interest is shifting to the district level due to the new paradigm of the smart system. This study presents a stochastic procedure to model dist...

Sedimentation in reservoirs constitutes a major issue worldwide, especially when hydropower, and hence profit, is involved. In this study, the sedimentation rates, due to soil erosion and sediment yields, are analyzed in the reservoir of the Rio di Pusteria hydropower dam, in South Tyrol (Italian Alps). The focus is on a five-year period, between t...

We present a new class of fully-discrete one-step SPH schemes based on a mesh-free ADER (Arbitrary DERivatives in space and time) reconstruction on moving particles in multiple space dimensions. In particular, the new SPH scheme computes mesh-free and local high order accurate polynomials in space and time to evaluate numerical fluxes at the midpoi...

Sediment flushing from dams can help desilting reservoirs and reinstate the longitudinal sediment transfer continuity in rivers, but negative ecological impacts might arise. We monitored the ecological effects of a flushing event conducted from 27th May to 14th June 2019 in the Rienz River, in South Tyrol (NE Italy). Using a multi-habitat scheme ap...

The evolution of smart water grids leads to new Big Data challenges boosting the development and application of Machine Learning techniques to support efficient and sustainable drinking water management. These powerful techniques rely on hyperparameters making the models’ tuning a tricky and crucial task. We hence propose an insightful analysis of...

Efficient energy production and distribution systems are urgently needed to reduce world climate change. Since modern district heating systems are sustainable energy distribution services that exploit renewable sources and avoid energy waste, in-depth knowledge of thermal energy demand, which is mainly affected by weather conditions, is essential t...

This work aims to describe how MODIS snow cover maps can be used to reduce uncertainty in hydrological modelling carried out by means of a topography-based distribution function snowmelt model. The well-known GLUE methodology is applied with a multi-objective approach, combining streamflow observations recorded at the outlet section and satellite-d...

Developing data-driven models for bursts detection is currently a demanding challenge for efficient and sustainable management of water supply systems. The main limit in the progress of these models lies in the large amount of accurate data required. The aim is to present a methodology for the generation of reliable data, which are fundamental to t...

Renewable and smart energy systems require district heating and cooling grids able to operate with variable flow rates, to manage different supply temperatures, and to support distributed energy production involving bidirectional flows. Due to these requirements, accurate and effective thermo-hydraulic models are essential to correctly simulate the...

Water leakages are one of the most significant uncertainties affecting water supply system (WSSs) modelling. Due to the dependence between water losses and pressure, the WSSs characterised by high values of pressure in the distribution network are strongly affected by this problem. High-pressure conditions are typical of WSSs in the mountain areas....

An experimental nonintrusive methodology is proposed to estimate the spatially averaged erosion rate of fine sediment from a gravel bed. The experiments performed in a laboratory flume show a progressive slowdown of the erosion rate as the level of fine sediment becomes deeper within the gravel matrix, until a maximum depth of erosion is reached. T...

Catchment geology has a major influence on the relative impact of the main seasonal hydrological predictability sources (initial conditions (IC), climate forcing (CF)) on the forecast skill as it defines the system's persistence. A quantification of its effect, though, on the contribution of the predictability sources to the forecast skill has not...

Sustainable urban energy planning depends on how renewable and local sources are integrated, how smart systems are implemented, and how synergies between regional and national policies are maximized. This study presents a methodology for the design of 100% renewable energy systems aiming to optimize the use of biomass and energy exchange with the n...

Proper hydraulic simulation models, which are fundamental to analyse a water distribution system, require a calibration procedure. This paper proposes a multi-objective procedure to calibrate water demands and pipe roughness distribution in the context of an ill-posed problem, where the number of measurements is smaller than the number of variables...

Moderate resolution imaging spectroradiometry (MODIS) snow cover accuracy has been assessed in the past at different scales, with various approaches and in relation to the many factors influencing the remote observation of snow-covered areas (SCA). However, the challenge of fully characterizing MODIS accuracy over forest sites is still open. In thi...

The selective trapping and erosion of fine particles that occur in a gravel bed river have important consequences for its stream ecology, water quality, and overall sediment budgeting. This is particularly relevant in water bodies that experience periodic alternation between sediment supply-limited conditions and high sediment loads, such as downst...

The objective of this study is to transform the arithmetic coefficients of the total sediment transport rate formula of Yang into fuzzy numbers, and thus create a fuzzy relationship that will provide a fuzzy band of in-stream sediment concentration. A very large set of experimental data, in flumes, was used for the fuzzy regression analysis. In a f...

The use of Pumps-as-Turbines (PaTs) to replace hydraulic turbines as energy-recovery units in industrial and civil applications is widening the penetration of hydropower in small-scale plants. PaTs show advantages in terms of installation costs and the availability of solutions. Water Distribution Networks (WDNs) represent a potential application w...

In the current era, the digitization of geographical data is a transverse need of several engineering sectors, including the hydraulic networks management. Thus, water supply systems' modelling requires adequate tools in both the digitization and the simulation phases. This paper presents the QEPANET plugin, which aims at merging the flexibility of...

For realistically modelling the residential heat load request for space heating and hot water the authors define a suitable two step stochastic model. The proposed methodology allows to predict the daily heat load profiles and the corresponding confidence intervals during the heating season.

A well-known approach to seasonal hydrological forecasting involves the use of ensembles as forcing to a hydrological model, based either on historical meteorological data (Ensemble Streamflow Prediction, ESP) or on forecasts produced by one or more dynamic climate models (multi-model approach). This work aims at investigating the role of initial h...

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This paper examines the complex dependence between peak district heating demand and outdoor temperature. Our aim is to provide the probability law of heat demand given extreme weather conditions, and derive useful implications for the management and production of thermal energy. We propose a copula-based approach and consider the case of the city o...