Comparison between FAVAD and general equations to evaluate the leakage lost flow in urban water distribution systems

ABSTRACT This paper models a real water distribution system (WDS) with a large number of leaks to determine if there is a difference between the flow lost by the WDS predicted by the FAVAD and the GENERAL equations. The effect of the area and the amount of non-visible/background leaks, the area of potentially detectable leaks, the pressure load and the discharge coefficient on the leakage flow rate in a WDS were studied using factorial design. The results show that the three significant factors in descending order are: the area of potentially detectable leaks, the interaction between the area of potentially detectable leaks and the head pressure and the area of background leaks. The amount of background leaks and the discharge coefficient do not influence the difference between the FAVAD and the GENERAL equations, neither as a main factor nor as an interaction with other factors.