Abstract

One of the major challenges in designing under pressure water transmission pipeline is the system protection against water-hammer pressures due to a pump trip. The best strategy is to use air-chamber; which imposes considerable costs. To mitigate the air-chamber volume, the use of air-inletvalvesis also suggested. Determination of air-chamber volume as well as the type and proper locations of air-inlet valves, aiming at the cost reduction, introduces an optimization problem. To solve this problem, this study exploitsthe central force optimization (CFO) method. Herein, a case study pipeline is optimized using the proposed model based on the CFO and is compared with results of a genetic algorithm (GA) based model. Both methods yielded almost the same results and led to about 30% saving in the system protection cost. However, a comparison between the methods showed that the CFO dramaticallyoutperforms GA in both terms of computational efficiency and reliability of the results.

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