Online Course on Advanced Water Transport and Distribution

This course covers cardinal aspects in water transport and distribution engineering such as hydraulic modelling, water-hammer theory, decision support systems, asset management or water quality.

State-of-the-art knowledge and cutting edge tools are taught enabling a vision of the water supply challenge much beyond standard engineering practices, a prerequisite when coping with global stresses like climate change, population growth or water scarcity. 

The course is subdivided into the following parts:

• Introduction to WTD: This section of the course focuses on distinguishing the main definitions and objectives of water transport and distribution systems.
• Geographic Information Systems: The students are introduced to GIS tools for pre- and post-processing of data when building numerical models and analyzing results output from simulations.
• Hydraulic modelling (I): advanced techniques to boost the applicability of hydraulic models by means of artificial intelligence techniques such as genetic algorithms are taught in this part of the course.
• Hydraulic modelling (II): In this part of the course students are introduced to advanced software, offering a range of add-ons to the basic computational hydraulics, such as automatic calibration, that enables bridging theory with practice in complex water distribution networks.
• Water-hammer theory: the physical phenomena of water-hammer wave will be explained, including the governing equations and the numerical methods for their solution. Critical thinking for post-accident analysis and surge protection is developed.
• Python tools for hydraulics: In this part of the course students get hands on Python, enabling them to make use of friendly applications for their WTD analyses.