Automating External Fire Flow Requests

Luke Butler

August 2014

What is Pressure and Flow?

• Used by Hydraulic Engineers in the design of fire services

• Ensure there is adequate supply of water for fire fighting

Background

3 PFI Automation - What is Pressure and Flow?

1 in 20 year event

1 full time equivalent

634 PFIs/Year

$221 average PFI cost

$111,864 total yearly cost

$0 profit

4 PFI Automation - What is Pressure and Flow?

5 L/s

4L/s

1 L/s

1 L/s

4 L/s

93 90

86 81

75

68

60 50

60

70

80

90

100

0 5 10 15 20 25 30

Pre

ssu

re (

m)

Flow (L/s)

93m 93m

95m

10 L/s

8L/s

2 L/s

2 L/s

8 L/s 86m 90m 90m

15 L/s

10L/s

5 L/s

5 L/s

10 L/s 81m

20 L/s

14L/s

6 L/s

6 L/s

14 L/s 75m

25 L/s

15L/s

10 L/s

10 L/s

15 L/s 68m

30 L/s

17L/s

13 L/s

13 L/s

17 L/s 60m

Full Surface Level

Pressure

Elevation

Hydraulic Losses

HG

L

Max Pressure

Sea Level

Full Surface Level

Pressure

Elevation

Hydraulic Losses

HG

L

Max Pressure

Sea Level

Single Supply (Previously known as a Grade 3) • Low risk developments

• Single tapping

• If there is a burst supply is lost

Types of Fire Services

5 PFI Automation - What is Pressure and Flow?

Dual Supply (Previously known as Grade 2) • High risk developments • Two tapping and divide valve • If there is a burst supply remains

Completing a PFI

6 PFI Automation - What is Pressure and Flow?

Application

• Hard copy application (email, fax, front desk)

• Customer Front End (CFE)

Review Period

• Supervisor reviews information

• Call consultant if necessary to confirm details

Hydraulics • Do hydraulic analysis

Extra Info

• Create plan

• Location, top water level, max pressure, 95% pressure, in-situ cement lined

Letter Review

• Check letter output

Information Example

Location 225 mm UPVC – 2.6 m from South B.L. of Corporate Drive

HGL 106.2m

Elevation 38 m

Max 70 m

Cement In-Situ Lined

False

Restricted Flow False

How Can We Automate PFIs?

• Currently semi-automated • Process requires us to do extra work • Remove extra work with these fixes:

• Submissions through CFE only • Auto generate plots • Auto detect extra information • Remove supervisor review • Fix up letter generation

• How do you automate the hydraulics?

Scope of Automation

8 PFI Automation - How Can We Automate PFIs?

Application

• Hard Copy Application

• Customer Front End

Review Period

• Supervisor reviews information

• Call consultant if necessary to confirm details

Hydraulics • Do hydraulic analysis

Extra Info

• Create plan

• Location, HGL, Max, 95%, Cement In-Situ Lined

Letter Review

• Check letter output

PFI Type Total Percent Percent

Single, 5 day 556 64%

88% 2 Single, 5 day 43 5%

Single, 1 day 152 17%

2 Single, 1 day 17 2%

Dual Supply, 5 day 71 8% 12%

Dual Supply, 1 day 31 4%

?

• As you need PFI results you push it to the hydraulic software to give you the answers

• Hydraulic software is closed source, and can be difficult to interact with

• InfoWorks WS didn’t have public APIs openly documented

• Change will break compatibility

• Previous attempts were made to use macros to simulate user interaction

Method One, Hydraulic Calculations on Demand

9 PFI Automation - How Can We Automate PFIs?

SEW CFE

Hydraulic Software PFI Letter

ICE

• Based on the limitations of an on demand system we investigated the use of bulk calculation

• Calculate PFI results on every main at 10 meter spacing

Method Two, Bulk Calculations

10 PFI Automation - How Can We Automate PFIs?

SEW CFE

Hydraulic Software PFI Letter

ICE

Result Database

• Tools to do this work exist but had some limitations at the time

• Internal tool was made for SynerGEE

• Innovyze to upgrade their software to add maximum velocity checks

9,000 km

of water mains

900,000

PFI calculations

Proposed Solution and Automating Results

• If we were to start again, would we do the same thing?

• Why not display it spatially?

• ICE still has its place

• Customer Self Service Portal

• Provide information for early investigations

• Refer difficult cases

Complete Automation

12 PFI Automation - Proposed Solution

• Three types of fire flow simulation options: • Fire Flow Availability

• Hydrant Testing

• Forced Fire Flow

• Forced fire flow would test a range of flows at a single location

• Hydrant testing would test a range of locations with a single flow rate

• To get around the limitation of a single flow rate we would run multiple simulations at a range of flow rates

Fire Flow Simulations

13 PFI Automation - Proposed Solution

Splitting Hydrants

14 PFI Automation - Proposed Solution

InfoWorks ODEC

SynerGEE Import

Break pipes at length

SynerGEE Export

InfoWorks ODIC

• Created Fire Flow Data objects for flow rates from 5L/s to 60L/s

• Create a set of runs for each of these flow rates

• Make sure you fill in the correct data

• Maximum velocity

• Minimum pressures

• Hydrant Parameters

Prep work

15 PFI Automation - Proposed Solution

• 8 Infoworks WS licences in full use

• Too many hydrants made iteration times too long, we limited each model to 20,000 hydrants

• Largest models took 5 days with 8 computers running at the same time

• 5 out of 11 models current complete

• PFI calculations were running for about 4 weeks before the official launch

Running the Models

16 PFI Automation - Proposed Solution

• 12 sets of hydrant testing results with a pass or fail and the pressure at that flow rate

• Combine these together and you will get a range of pressure and flows for all locations

• Extra sim results needed for • Minimum pressure • 95 percentile pressure • Maximum pressure

• Also export additional meta data • Merge together and then imported

into a database

Export Results

17 PFI Automation - Proposed Solution

Demo and Questions

18 PFI Automation - Proposed Solution