Elsevier

Journal of Environmental Management

Volume 243, 1 August 2019, Pages 177-186
Journal of Environmental Management

Research article
Experimental study for effects of terrain features and rainfall intensity on infiltration rate of modelled permeable pavement

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvman.2019.04.096Get rights and content

Highlights

  • A series of measured data in different slopes and rainfall intensities under three permeable conditions are obtained.

  • A sensitive range of terrain slope to steady infiltration is found.

  • For different rainfalls, the 0°–5° slope is more sensitive than 5°–10° slope.

  • And the effect of the cross slope is higher than that of the longitudinal slope.

  • The effect of longitudinal, cross slope and rainfall on infiltration rate is expressed by quadratic polynomial functions.

Abstract

In order to investigate the effects of the terrain slopes and rainfall intensity on the steady infiltration rate of permeable pavement, an experiment with the combinations of three types of permeability, three kinds of rainfall intensity, different cross slope and longitudinal slope are undertaken. Through analyzing the experimental data, it is indicated that: (1) the relation between the steady infiltration rate and the cross and longitudinal slopes can be described by power functions, i.e. as the slopes increase, the steady infiltration rate decreases. The steady infiltration rate can be reduced by 23.3%–72.2% and 12.6%–22.2% for the slopes ranging from 0° to 5° and from 5° to 10°, respectively, illustrating the infiltration is more sensitive to the 0°–5° slope; (2) Under the same conditions, the effect of the cross slope on the steady infiltration rate is about 1.1–1.4 times as high as that of the longitudinal slope, i.e. the cross slope varying could lead to more obvious infiltration change, comparing to the longitudinal slope; (3) The relation between the rainfall intensity and the infiltration rate can be reflected by power function as well. The higher the rainfall intensity, the more the steady infiltration rate increases; (4) The comprehensive effect of the cross slope, longitudinal slope and rainfall intensity on steady infiltration rate can be expressed by quadratic polynomial functions. The main purpose of the manuscript is to determine how the slopes and the rainfall intensities affect the infiltration process and guide the plan and design of the permeable pavement in practical engineering.

Introduction

With fast urbanization in developing countries, e.g. China, the impervious area has expanded dramatically, causing increased urban runoff. Besides, climate change leads to more frequent extreme storms, the urban floods therefore become more severe, bringing about a series of new problems and challenges (Bertilsson et al., 2018, Mustafa et al., 2018). Permeable pavement (PP), a kind of low-impact development (LID) measure, has been implemented to control the stormwater runoff in urban areas, through increasing infiltration, especially in the area where impermeable surface is continuous and extensive (Andersen et al., 1999, Kamali et al., 2017, Lu et al., 2019). For example, Fassman and Blackbourn (2010) monitored the respective runoff from a 200m2 permeable pavement test site and an adjacent 850m2 conventional asphalt road catchment concurrently between 2006 and 2008 in Auckland, New Zealand, and results indicate that the overall hydrologic performance of the permeable pavement was fairly good.

The infiltration ability of the permeable pavements can be affected by various factors, such as surface materials, structures, the laying slope and rainfall intensity (Liu and Chui, 2017). To investigate such effects and try to increase the infiltration potential of the permeable pavement, some experiments were developed. Kumar et al. (2016) measured infiltration performance of three permeable parking sections (permeable pavers, permeable concrete and permeable asphalt) over a four-year period since construction. There was only a marginal decline in infiltration rates of all three pavements after one year of use, and between years two to four, the infiltration rates declined significantly due to clogging of pores. Valinski and Chandler (2015) have focused on the impact of different surface materials on infiltration. They used six different materials at surface layer and found that infiltration rate of porous asphalt was the highest. Rahman et al. (2015) observed that the geotechnical and hydraulic properties of the construction and demolition (C&D) materials were equivalent or even superior to that of the typical quarry granular materials. Alyaseri and Zhou (2016) did an experiment and the results show different reduction percentages from different types of pavement (36%, 13% and 46% from permeable concrete, permeable asphalt and permeable pavers, respectively). Kamali et al. (2017) also do an experiment and the data showed that the PP was completely clogged after seven hydrological years, however, if they are annually cleaned, it is expected that PPs can function hydraulically during their life span by a proper maintenance. Collins et al. (2008) studied the infiltration capability of the pervious concrete (PC), two types of permeable interlocking concrete pavement (PICP) and concrete grid pavers (CGP), drawing a conclusion that various permeable pavements had similarity with respect to the runoff reduction. In addition to the materials, other researchers have studied the impacts of pavement structures on the infiltration capability. For instance, Brunetti et al. (2016) simulated the pavement by establishing a single-porosity physical model for all layers of the permeable pavement and a dual-porosity physical model for the base and sub-base layers at the University of Calabria. The results showed that the latter pavement had higher infiltration.

In addition to the surface materials and structures, the paving slope and rainfall intensity also play an important role in affecting the infiltration rate. Morbidelli et al. (2015) performed experiments with soil surface for different slopes of 1°, 5° and 10°. The results showed that, in the case of a nearly horizontal soil surface, 1°, the surface flow was equal to zero, while for a soil surface with 5° and 10°, steady surface flow was generated. However, less attention has been paid to quantitatively investigate such effects on pavement. As the rainfall and terrain patterns are various in different urban areas, such effects are sometimes very important when making proper urban plans and the infrastructure designs, e.g. in some hilly city like Chongqing, China. To bridge the research gap, an experimental platform which could model different slopes and rainfall intensities was set up in this work. The experimental results are analyzed to systematically evaluate the effect of longitudinal slope, cross slope and rainfall intensity on steady infiltration rate.

This paper is organized as follows: the experimental platform and program are introduced in the second section. Subsequently, the experimental results are presented and analyzed in Section 3. Finally, brief conclusions are drawn in Section 4.

Section snippets

Experiment platform

In this work, an experimental platform was devised to investigate the steady infiltration rate effects under different conditions, including three types of permeability, three kinds of rainfall intensity (48 mm ⁄ h, 78 mm ⁄ h, 174 mm ⁄ h) and different slope combinations (cross slopes α of 0°, 5°, 10° and longitudinal slopes β of 0°, 5°, 10°). The platform is 3 m wide, 7 m long and 0.8 m high, mainly consisting of rainfall simulator, modelled permeable pavement, modelled road, infiltration and

Evaluation of the longitudinal slope effect on the infiltration rate

The experimental results with the changing longitudinal slope and fixed cross slope under three permeable conditions are shown in Fig. 6. It is indicated that as the longitudinal slope increases, the steady infiltration rate gradually reduces under the same permeable and rainfall intensity conditions. The relation between slope and infiltration is similar to that of (Huang et al., 2013).

Taking α = 0° and P = 174 mm ⁄ h as an example, the steady infiltration rate respectively decreases by 31.8%,

Conclusion

Through a set of experiments, this work systematically analyses the effects of the cross slope, longitudinal slope and rainfall intensity on the steady infiltration rate under different permeable conditions, drawing the following conclusions:

  • The relation between the steady infiltration rate and cross slope, longitudinal slopes can be described by power functions, i.e. as the slopes increase, the steady infiltration rate decreases. The steady infiltration rate can be reduced by 23.3%–72.2% and

Acknowledgment

This research is supported by the following projects: National Natural Science Foundation of China (19672016); National Significant R & D Program (2016YFC0402704); Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 41330858); Technical Center in Spongy City in Fengxi New City.

Jingming Houand Yangwei Zhang contributed equally to this work.

Cited by (30)

View all citing articles on Scopus
View full text