Tipping Points for Water Infrastructure in the City of the Future

Disruptive water innovations for cities, including many in TWENTY65, will impact the performance of centralised water infrastructure (drinking water, sewer, stormwater) in terms of water quantity and quality.

At a city scale, tradeoffs between different water uses and qualities will need to be understood and managed, particularly as a transition away from the current centralised infrastructure paradigm begins to happen. It is likely that tipping points will emerge where uptake of disruptive innovations results in a variety of tradeoffs requiring resolution, such as degradation of drinking water quality due to reduced flows (from rainwater harvesting replacing nonpotable uses, decrease in leakage, water efficiency in homes), water quality degradation and sedimentation in sewers (from SUDS, grey water reuse or waterless toilets), reduction in reuse potential from centralised systems (from SUDS, household reuse) and ability of existing pumps to perform under changing time patterns and quantities of usage affecting energy consumption.

While some research has been done on the impact of individual technologies (e.g. SUDS) at a household or neighbourhood scale, there has not been a comprehensive study of impacts of multiple technologies integrated across an entire city scale that focuses on performance of pipe infrastructure networks with substantive numerical modelling rather than overview mass balance approaches to integrated water resource management. Water quality aspects have also not been addressed.

The novelty of this work will be to link across multiple themes of TWENTY65 under several future scenarios to 1) understand the tradeoffs between different water qualities, uses, and disruptive innovations at a city scale; 2) perform modelling of water and sewer networks with different combinations of solutions to quantify impacts and identify future performance criteria for network design and operation; 3) develop tools/models that can support the integration tools under development in Theme 8, which lack detail on the pipe networks.