Article

Jorge Alberto Arciniegas Badillo Code:15201103

For years, particularly in developing countries, companies providing drinking water service
(EPS) have used empirical procedures to locate, in their distribution networks, the points at
which periodic sampling should be done in order to ensure that they comply with the
minimum water quality standards. Although today these companies have excellent
computer tools to model the dynamics of water in networks, as well as the evolution of
water quality, there is not enough data to scientifically choose these points. In particular,
the decay coefficients of chlorine, both body and wall, are not available. Despite this
limitation, methodologies have been developed and implemented with the aim of designing
sensor networks that guarantee a constant monitoring of water quality in distribution
systems, but these involve a high degree of uncertainty. In the research object of this article,
a methodology was developed that would allow in this environment of few data, to choose
water quality monitoring points (PMC) that responded simultaneously to two typical
problems of distribution networks. On the one hand, the aim was to guarantee the quality of
the water, as measured by a chlorine residual, using software developed for this study, and
on the other hand to detect problems of water coloring (a phenomenon in which water
reaches a set of water). users have a different color than transparent, affecting the
perception of quality by said users) due to the detachment of biofilms, making use of the
TEVA-SPOT program (Berry et al., 2008). This last approach can be developed under the
optimization of multiple objective functions according to the type of protection that one
wishes to guarantee, against the coloration events. The new methodology was applied
successfully in the 37 hydraulic sectors in which the drinking water network of the city of
Bogotá, Colombia (approximately 8,000,000 inhabitants) is divided. Finally, although the
study was carried out for the 37 sectors, one of these sectors was taken, as an example for
this document, as a type network. The results show that both methodologies are reliable and
that the design of the sensor network depends on the objective to be optimized. Published
in technology and water sciences: ISSN 2007-2422