Strategic Placement of In-line Turbines for Optimum Power Generation and Leakage Reduction in Water Supply Networks

Conduit hydropower systems improve the efficiency of water supply networks (WSNs) by utilizing excess network pressure for providing renewable energy while significantly reducing leakage. A major problem in using conduit hydropower is finding the optimum location for installing power generation devices like in-line turbines or pumps operating as turbines (PATs). This paper suggests an optimization model to find the optimum location for placing in-line turbines in WSNs using a non-parametric Rao algorithm for optimal daily power generation. The methodology is tested on a hypothetical 5-Node network and later applied to a benchmark 25-Node network. Installing turbines at optimum locations reduced network leakage by 76332.00 and 380473.87 L, representing approximately 2.57% & 2.94% of the total water demand of 5-Node and 25-Node networks, respectively, and generated 184.12 & 547.48 kWh/day of hydropower.