SIMDEUM, a tool to predict and explain drinking water demand over the day for a single household, has many applications from designing a water network to hydraulic and water quality modelling in the drinking water network. We give an overview of the applications and the relation between the type of application and the required model detail. The design requires a temporal scale of 1 s and a spatial scale of 20 homes or more; water quality modelling requires 5 min and a single home.

In Colombia in the last decades, turbidity and contamination events have become a major concern for many environmental authorities and drinking water companies. Therefore, there is a need for alternative technologies to improve the quality of the source water used for the water supply. This article assesses the potential of using riverbank filtration for the highly turbid waters in Colombia, emphasizing water quality improvement and the influence of clogging by suspended solids.

Breastshot water wheels are hydropower converters that efficiently work at low head sites (lower than 4 m) and at low discharges (1.2 cubic meters per meter width maximum). Water wheels represent an attractive solution for decentralized energy production. The aim of this work is to improve the performance of an existing water wheel by changing the blade shape using numerical simulations. An optimal profile was determined, and general recommendations for the blade design are reported.

In developed countries, a safe and adequate water supply is usually taken for granted. However, an estimated 700 million people worldwide still live without access to this basic service. In order to achieve universal water coverage by 2030, either global spending on water projects should increase, which is not easy as it stands now, or the cost of water supply systems should decrease. This paper discusses the development of appropriate pipe network design methods, or models, for the latter.

The cost optimization of piped water networks consists of choosing pipe diameters. Networks also consist of tanks that act as buffers between the source and demand nodes. Typically the tank configuration is done in an ad hoc fashion. It is therefore desirable to also include this tank configuration choice in the cost optimization. We explain why the choice of tank configuration is important in network design and describe a system called JalTantra that aids the designers of piped water networks.