Characterizing the impact of hydrants on transients

Attempts have been made to detect and locate leakage using hydraulic transients; however, there has been limited success under field-based conditions on operational systems. It is believed that this is partly due to fire hydrants, the most convenient access points, complicating the signal generated and received in the operational systems. Using the transient simulator TSNet based on the method of characteristics (MOC), this paper demonstrates that hydrants can have a significant impact on transient signals and that characterizing and filtering for the hydrant impact can lead to more accurate leak localization. A practical method for characterizing hydrant properties is proposed using an inverse transient analysis approach (ITA) and validated numerically.