Back in the dark ages (e.g., the 1980s) before everyone had video capabilities on their cell phones, creating a training video was a big production. Video cameras (and their batteries) weighed about 30 pounds and editing tools we crude. I was doing a lot of flow testing in those days while working for the Army Corps of Engineers at the Waterways Experiment Station (WES) in Vicksburg, Mississippi. I had some money available and wanted to capture not only the mechanics of flow testing, but how to use the results of such tests in modelling. I didn’t want this to be a boring video with me as a talking head with a shot of a flow test. This was also a at that time, MTV was becoming very popular (Remember when MTV played videos? At least I hope some of you do.), so I wanted to use a lot of short scenes interlaced with music (and perhaps a little humor). This is how I became the writer, producer, director, and narrator for a training video on hydrant flow tests. I was shooting for something like historian James Burke’s “Connections” series for engineers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(British_TV_series) The video production came down to a couple

AWWA recently announced the release of the fourth edition of its popular manual, M22-Sizing Service Lines and Meters. You might be thinking, “What could be new in sizing service lines?” For the most part, not much has changed, but there has been a major update to the way that residential peak demand is calculated. If you only have a single fixture in a building, then the peak demand in the building is the same as for the single fixture. If you have two fixtures, just add the demands. As the number of fixtures increases, however, the chance that all will be running at the same time decreases. This problem was solved nearly a century ago by Roy B. Hunter of the National Bureau of Standards (Hunter 1940, 1941) who developed an expedient method based on the Binomial theorem and flows from typical water fixtures from the 1930s. The result was the widely used Hunter’s Curves that related the peak water demands to the number of fixture units. The iconic Hunter’s Curve worked so well that it was quickly incorporated into many plumbing codes around the world. Over the years, however, the Hunter’s fixture unit concept has been modified by various

The term given to this process is “Daylighting” (although the term gets used in a lot of other situations). The American Rivers organization is one of the leading groups in the U.S. that promotes stream daylighting. Their definition is, “Stream daylighting revitalizes streams by uncovering some or all of a previously covered river, stream, or stormwater drainage.

Water utilities provide safe, clean water to communities and charge for the service based on metered water consumption. However, not every drop of water produced at a water treatment plant reaches customers and generates revenue for water companies. Instead, a significant portion of drinking water is lost due to undetected water leaks in the distribution pipelines or unauthorized water usage.

I often title my blogs with a question that I’m very happy to try to answer. “What’s the Capacity of That Pipe?” is not one of those questions. Unless you make some simplifying assumptions such as “The pipe is flowing at normal depth” or “The full pipe velocity is 5 ft/s,” the real answer is elusive. I usually respond with a litany of questions, including “Why are you calculating this?” and “What assumptions are you willing to make?” The most important distinction is whether the pipe is designed to flow full, like a water distribution pipe, or a sewer force main, as opposed to a gravity sanitary, combined, or storm sewer. Therefore, there is a two-part answer to the question in this blog but they both go back to this simple equation: Q = A V Where Q = flow (and in this case capacity), A is the cross-sectional area occupied by the flow, and V is the velocity. Such a little equation for such a big concept. Regulatory/administrative people like to treat the capacity as a fixed number. If someone says the capacity is 500 gpm, and you want approval to use the pipe to move 499 gpm, you

Work on the upcoming AWWA Manual on Energy (M83) is wrapping up, and I’ve been working with Eric Dole, National Water and Energy Practice Lead for Garver, on the pumping chapter. It’s shaping up nicely. One topic that has come up is: What’s the best metric for judging if a pump or a pump station is working well vs. one that is wasting energy and money? There are quite a few potential metrics, and they all have their strengths. The definitions vary, but the most common are: Efficiency Energy intensity Or, in some cases: Where e = efficiency, Q = flow, h = pump head, P = power, i1 and i2 are two different formulations for energy intensity, and the k values are unit conversion factors that depend on the units used. Efficiency can either be pump efficiency or wire-to-water efficiency. For pump comparison, it is best to use wire-to-water efficiency because it accounts for motor and drive efficiency. We can solve these equations simultaneously to give: Or Essentially, energy intensity is just the inverse of efficiency. Efficient pumps have a low energy intensity. The difference between i1 and i2 is that i1 has a worse intensity for pumps discharging

I’ve read a lot of papers about water loss reduction. Two concepts that show up frequently are Minimum Nighttime Flow (MNF) and District Metered Areas (DMA). DMAs are areas in the distribution system that can be isolated such that all system inflows and outflows (not including customer use) are metered. They are helpful in identifying areas where leakage is prevalent. Most of the time, leakage is a small fraction flow, and it is difficult to identify a small/medium leak in a DMA. For example, recognizing a 10 gpm leak in a DMA with a 200 gpm average flow is easier than finding one when the demand is 20,0000 gpm. However, in the middle of the night, water use in DMAs decreases and leakage becomes a more easily identifiable portion of the flow. The flow at this time is referred to as the MNF and it is usually measured at an hour somewhere between 1 a.m. and 5 a.m. If the MNF is less than or about 50% of the average daily flow, that DMA is not considered a likely source of major leakage. If it is higher and if it changes fairly suddenly, that’s a good place to look for

First of all, we need to forget about the word “exactly” in the title. When dealing with turbulent flow in water and wastewater systems, there is no theoretically perfect equation for head loss. All turbulent flow head loss equations for water are empirical to a certain extent. If you ask university faculty who teach hydraulics, they will tell you that the Darcy-Weisbach equation is the correct equation, and they will denigrate the Hazen-Williams equation. My fluid mechanics textbook from my school days, Streeter, Fluid Mechanics, did not even mention the Hazen-Williams equation. However, if you walk down the street to the local water utility or engineering consultant office, they will be using the Hazen-Williams equation. Why the discrepancy? There are some good reasons why the Darcy-Weisbach equation is theoretically better. It is based on a force balance between pressure and gravity forces driving the flow and the friction/turbulence restraining the flow. This equation applies to any Newtonian fluid, not just water at room temperature. It can accommodate not only a range of roughness but also a range of boundary layer types. Why don’t practicing engineers use Darcy-Weisbach? Looking at the Darcy-Weisbach equation below, everyone understands the independent variables: head loss

The ability to integrate your sanitary and combined sewer models with some of the leading engineering software is essential to delivering accurate and optimal designs.