This work is an outgrowth of engineering service learning at Villanova University in Pennsylvania, USA. Teams of students assess and collect data on site, and design and communicate information for clean water networks that benefit developing areas around the world. The design of a water network requires the selection of pipe diameters that satisfy pressure and flow requirements while minimizing cost. This work contrasts and compares results of several models and makes key recommendations.

Public drinking water distribution systems can be contaminated. Sensors designed to detect contaminants can provide warning through the use of a contamination warning system (CWS). A properly designed CWS may help reduce the consequences associated with contamination events. Various factors can affect the performance of a CWS design, our paper focuses on the accuracy with which the network model of a distribution system represents the actual structural details of the water distribution network.

EPANET does not always conserve constituent mass during water-quality simulations. The failure to conserve mass can result in significant errors in constituent concentrations. We document the occurrence of mass imbalances, explain why they occur, provide recommendations for minimizing mass imbalances, and present a preliminary water-quality algorithm for use in EPANET that always conserves mass. Our paper should be of interest to anyone who performs water-quality simulations using EPANET.

The article introduces a stable formulation of the model for water distribution systems that guarantees the existence of a unique solution. This is done regarding two modeling paradigms. First for models with customer demand as a fixed boundary condition and second for models that add a boundary condition on the minimum network pressure. The following discussion concludes that pressure-driven models are superior in modeling deficient networks, but still have to be improved.

Water temperature in the drinking water distribution system (DWDS) and at the customers' taps approaches the surrounding soil temperature at 1 m in depth. In the Netherlands drinking water is distributed without additional residual disinfectant and drinking water temperature at the customers' tap should not exceed 25 ºC. Some urban infrastructures are heat sources and generate hot-spots. This article describes a method to find anthropogenic heat sources that influence temperature in the DWDS.