Stormwater characteristics and new testing methods for certain sustainable urban drainage systems in The Netherlands

The results obtained in this study are encouraging and important for the implementation of permeable pavement and swales in The Netherlands, since the performance of SUDS in delta areas and in areas in the world with comparable hydraulic circumstances has been viewed with skepticism. The research undertaken on Dutch SUDS field installations has demonstrated with new, full scale monitoring methods that most of the bioretention swales and permeable pavements tested in this study meet the required hydraulic performance levels even after years in operation and without maintenance. Standardized tests of sedimentation devices however demonstrated that these facilities have a limited effectiveness for particles smaller than 60 µm while receiving a normal hydraulic loading. The applied methods of full scale testing of SUDS can easily be applied to observe the hydraulic performance of swales and permeable pavement after years of operation. Innovative monitoring methods and visualization of these experiments using video footage allows real-time observation of the entire infiltration process. Recording these observations in a logbook can provide insight in their demand of maintenance and can also help to improve their design.Water ManagementCivil Engineering and Geoscience

Effect drijvende constructies op waterkwaliteit

Water ManagementCivil Engineering and Geoscience

Stormwater quality characteristics in (Dutch) urban areas and performance of settlement basins

Stormwaters, flowing into storm sewers, are known to significantly increase the annual pollutant loads entering urban receiving waters and this results in significant degradation of the receiving water quality. Knowledge of the characteristics of stormwater pollution enables urban planners to incorporate the most appropriate stormwater management strategies to mitigate the effects of stormwater pollution on downstream receiving waters. This requires detailed information on stormwater quality, such as pollutant types, sediment particle size distributions, and how soluble pollutants and heavy metals attach themselves to sediment particles. This study monitored stormwater pollution levels at over 150 locations throughout the Netherlands. The monitoring has been ongoing for nearly 15 years and a total of 7,652 individual events have been monitored to date. This makes the database the largest stormwater quality database in Europe. The study compared the results to those presented in contemporary international stormwater quality research literature. The study found that the pollution levels at many of the Dutch test sites did not meet the requirements of the European Water Framework Directive (WFD) and Dutch Water Quality Standards. Results of the study are presented and recommendations are made on how to improve water quality with the implementation of Sustainable Urban Drainage Systems (SUDS) devices.Water ManagementCivil Engineering and Geoscience