This paper presents a model, based on potential curves, that describes the behaviour of the inverse of the daily cumulated frequency of the flows provided to a District Metered Area (DMA). The model has two terms, the first corresponds to the variable consumption due to the aggregation of demand patterns of consumers. The evolution of this term presents periodic behaviours with annual and weekly frequency. An extreme drought episode that affected Catalunya, reduced this parameter 19%. A second term presents exponential behaviour in its evolution and includes the real leakage. The leakage disaggregation together with the billing information allows the estimation of the apparent loses, 14.89% in the case study. The difficulty of estimating the parameters in a potential model, a complex problem of optimization, is simplified by applying mathematical moments. Hence, daily parameters become a linear relation of the daily moments that allows their algebraic operation.

This work has been partially funded by the Spanish State Research Agency (AEI) and the European Regional Development Fund (ERFD) through the projects SCAV (ref. MINECO DPI2017-88403-R) and DEOCS (ref. MINECO DPI2016-76493) and AGAUR ACCIO RIS3CAT UTILITIES 4.0 – P4 MODEM. Data have been gently provided by the company Aigües de Manresa.

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Urban Water Journal on 18 May 2020, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/1573062X.2020.1764594

Peer Reviewed