Sustainable Urban Drainage Systems:

• Ponds
• Swails (grass virges)
• Permiable pavements

All about keeping the water from flowing into sewers and putting it into a sustainable environment to reduce run-off.

There are three things that happen when it rains:

• Volume- when it rains a huge volume of water is deposited into the sewer system.
• Routing – water flows in sewers at different rates.
• Initial losses – not all of it goes into the sewer.

When rain flows into the sewers it either gets stored, passed to treatment works, or flows through overflows into rivers.

Impermiable area (the area that has been paved over): In London 22*area of Hyde Park has been paved over in the last 50 years.

Huge models are created in order to predict sewage run-off and make sure system works. They can be used to predict run-off and predict flooding based on the impermiable area.

Green roofs: roofs with plants, grasses, moss etc on them. These increase air-quality around the buildings. They help cool buildings and provide thermal mass: increased installation. Lastly, they lag and attenuate rainfall – delaying the flow of rainfall into the sewer system, thus preventing overspill.

Green roofs are heavy so retrofitting them to older buildings may involve structural changes to increase support for the roof. New buildings can be designed with this in mind. Older buildings may have better design tolerances – new buildings are built with less margin for error.

Civil engineering project at the University of Sheffield.

Test roof on the University of Sheffield Mappin Building. Run-off from test roof is collected in the tank. Weight of column of water on pressure transducer is recorded every minute. Tank empties when full via a valve. Data is reported in CSV: date, rain, mV pressure reading.

Real-time display:

• convert pressure recorded in mV to mm run-off.
• Isolate variation sin sensor data
• Real time display of data.

Previous manual analysis method doesn’t scale to the number of measurements being taken by this system. Need an automated processing method. Also need to account for natural variences in data caused by external factors such as wind, temperature changes, and the water being emptied out periodically.

Technical design: LAMP stack used. Separate processes run for logging and analysis – can analyse and still be recording data. JavaScript interactive controls and imput validation. PHP used for initial parameters. CSS for layout on HTML 4.

Interface design: Bringing civil engineering to the engineers, but also anyone else that might e interested – looked at publications. Science Museum principle: “Sound science” – shows real things that you can learn from.

System has a “storm mode” – automatically detects periods of heavy rainfall and can skip through storms in order. System also has different levels of technical documentation for different audiences.

Data analysis applications include examining the period between storms and how this relates to the water-storage performance of the roof.

If Green Roofs become a standard feature of homes they will significantly alter the dynamics of floods by buffering water.

This project makes available types of information not usually available online: green roof data can be merged with flood warning data and historical data.

Live system at: http://greenroof.shef.ac.uk/

Related posts:

1. Fred Sonnenwald: Finding Information Human interaction, collaboration, how we interact with the environment around...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.