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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Water
Sec. Water and Built Environment
Volume 7 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/frwa.2025.1480970
This article is part of the Research Topic Urban Water Network Planning and Management: Perspectives and Solutions in the Transition Towards Smart Systems from the City to the End-use Scale View all articles

The optimal location of tanks in water distribution networks using failure tolerance

Provisionally accepted
Aaron Kalonji Kapata Aaron Kalonji Kapata Adesola Ilemobade Adesola Ilemobade *
  • University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    The location of tanks impacts the optimal design and reliability of water distribution networks. However, contention exists in the literature regarding the best location for tanks. The aim of this study was therefore to develop a tool to compute failure tolerance when pipe failure occurs in a water distribution network, and as a consequence, to determine the optimal location of a tank(s). To achieve this, 5 optimal designs of the Anytown Network (ATN), which is a benchmark water distribution network in the literature, were selected. These designs, which recommended additional tanks at different locations of the network, were hydraulically simulated using pressure driven analysis in EPANET 2.2, and these results validated. To compute failure tolerance, a Microsoft Excel® tool was developed, validated and applied to the hydraulically simulated results of the optimal ATN designs. The comparison of the failure tolerance values generated revealed the influence of tank location on the ATN reliability during pipe failure i.e. while each optimal ATN design generated a failure tolerance > 0.68 (a less vulnerable network), the best location for an additional tank(s) was downstream of the demand centre. Incidentally, this design emerged as the cheapest and therefore points to the fact that a higher network reliability need not be a more expensive network.

    Keywords: Tank location, Anytown network, Simple network, Reliability, Failure tolerance

    Received: 14 Aug 2024; Accepted: 13 Jan 2025.

    Copyright: © 2025 Kapata and Ilemobade. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Adesola Ilemobade, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa

    Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.