ABSTRACT
A lot has been written about the relevance of potable water for public health. Researchers in the field of water distribution are continuously concerned with performance improvement of distribution networks, analysing specifically the 'diseases' related to water demand and leakage reduction, corrosion growth, water hammer impacts, pump failures or else. Drawing parallels with medicine may therefore not be so ridiculous; it is almost that the average life expectancy of water users could be brought into a proportion with the average lifetime of the network components. Some futuristic research topic could aim at possible correlations between the condition of distribution networks and medical records of the population supplied from them. It is not quite clear how feasible such a research could be, but it is very clear that computer models would be playing essential role in it. Hardly any field of civil engineering has benefited so early from the development of PC computer technology, as it did the field of water distribution. Hydraulic modelling software launched massively in the developed countries in early eighties, has been speedily introduced all over the world. Water quality modelling applications that followed with the delay of some 10-15 years are nowadays equally available in practice. Such breakthrough allowed a single water distribution expert to analyse dozens of design and operational scenarios for the same time that would be required by a dozen of experts to analyse a single one in the era of manual calculations and hydraulic tables and diagrams, being daily practice just a couple of decades ago. The trend accelerated significantly by the end of the millennium, and the challenges of water distribution in the 21st century go even beyond optimisation of design and operation of selected layouts. New possibilities are opened to look deeper into the mechanisms of corrosion, sediment transport and other phenomena that are affecting maintenance practices and eventually play role in the overall ageing of the system.
