Reaction coefficient assessment and rechlorination optimization for chlorine residual equalization in water distribution networks

Recently, users’ complaints on drinking water quality are increasing according to emerging interest in the drinking water service issues such as pipe aging and various water quality accidents. In the case of drinking water quality complaints, not only the water pollution but also the inconvenience on the chlorine residual for disinfection are included, thus various efforts, such as rechlorination treatment, are being attempted in order to keep the chlorine concentration supplied evenly. In this research, for a more accurate water quality simulation of water distribution network, the water quality reaction coefficients were estimated, and an optimization method of chlorination/ rechlorination scheduling was proposed consideirng satisfaction of water quality standards and chlorine residual equalization. The proposed method was applied to a large-scale real water network, and various chlorination schemes were comparatively analyzed through the grid search algorithm and optimized based on the suitability and uniformity of supplied chlorine residual concentration.