Date of Award
8-1-2025
Degree Name
Master of Science
Department
Civil Engineering
First Advisor
Shin, Sangmin
Abstract
Water distribution system (WDS) is one of the important aspects of the well-being of human society. The equitable distribution of quality water is a fundamental right of every consumer. Current WDSs face growing threats from infrastructure deterioration, climate change, drought, pollution, and depletion of water resources. In response to these challenges and their uncertainties, decentralized WDSs have been increasingly accepted across various engineering sectors. An example of decentralized water systems is the integration of locally available water resources within existing centralized WDSs. This enables utilization of local water resources, reducing the dependency on centralized water supply and thereby enhancing the system resilience. However, decentralized systems often come with additional costs. Therefore, it is essential to assess both the resilience and sustainability aspects of these systems. This study explores the resilience of decentralized systems in short-term demand change that enables effective design and implementation of resilient infrastructure. The energy-based resilience calculation has been used for the resilience evaluation. The study results show that the decentralized WDS are resilient to the short-term demand change due to the distributed nature. Moreover, this study explores the energy-related sustainability at various levels of decentralized WDSs in long-term demand change scenarios. Understanding the different levels of decentralized WDS helps in optimizing the use of local resources and provide valuable insights in design and implementation of such systems. Additionally, analyzing the demand change scenarios helps to understand the long-term performance of the decentralized WDSs for effective planning and decision-making. This study evaluates energy-related sustainability of decentralized WDS using Triple Bottom Line (TBL) framework: economic, environmental, and social aspects. The economic aspect is evaluated through capital and operational costs, the environmental aspect is evaluated based on Green House Gas (GHG) emissions from the pump operations, and the social aspect is evaluated by examining the surplus energy in the system. The study also examines the pump curve changes that influence power consumption, thereby impacting the energy-related sustainability. The sustainability evaluation concludes that decentralized systems have increased costs, increased GHG emissions, and reduced surplus energy during demand increase scenarios without proper additional strategy. Since the centralized nodes have higher energy and heads, pump curves of centralized pumps can be adjusted after the introduction of decentralized system. This results in a reduction of the cost and GHG emissions associated with the centralized main pump, therefore enhancing energy-related sustainability.In summary, the goal of this thesis is to analyze the resilience and sustainability of decentralized WDSs to the demand change scenarios. The resilience is evaluated in short-term demand change while the sustainability is evaluated at various levels of decentralization in long-term demands change scenarios. Additionally, the research concludes that proper adjustments of pump curves make decentralized WDS more sustainable.
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