InfraSense: A Distributed System for the Continuous Analysis of Hydraulic Transients

This paper describes a novel approach for the continuous monitoring and analysis of the dynamic hydraulic conditions in water transmission and distribution systems. The developed InfraSense data logging and management technology extracts static and dynamic indicators which characterise the occurrence of hydraulic instabilities and unsteady-state flows. Computationally efficient embedded algorithms are described to adaptively derive thresholds for the detection of transient events. A novel algorithm for the representation and classification of transient events in a distributed sensing environment is presented (a stroke-based transient descriptor). One hundred InfraSense systems are currently deployed to facilitate the most thorough investigation to date of the occurrence of hydraulic transients in water supply systems.