Preliminary Estimation of Spatial and Temporal Synchronization of Water Demands in the City of Tripoli

Salah H. A. Saleh, Mohamed Alsharif, Ali Ahmed Elkebir, and Edawi Wheida

Civil Engineering Department/Faculty of Engineering, University of Tripoli, Tripoli, Libya

Abstract: Water supply systems represent an essential component of the infrastructure in urban populations worldwide. Water distribution systems are designed by sizing system components so that they meet current and future demands to be provided at minimum required levels of water pressure and quality. The sizing of pipelines is highly dependent on the amount of water demands allocated to distribution nodes of the system under consideration. The current demand allocation practices normally imply that there is perfect spatial synchronization among the aggregated demands, which is not essentially the case in practice. However, the way users react in real-world systems highly depends on many factors that differ from one user to another such as social habits and financial constraints. Recent studies anticipated that low levels of spatial demand synchronization can result in significant savings of the capital cost of water supply systems. In this paper, an investigation on the actual demand spatial synchronization is carried out using field measurements of diurnal demand patterns for different users in a residential area located in the city of Tripoli. Results showed that users react independently and the correlation is far away from the perfect case.