Stormwater Modeling
- Abraham Toribio II
Determination of stormwater or runoff resulting from a single or multiple rainfall event(s) is the most important component of stormwater management, and is commonly known as rainfall-runoff modeling or stormwater modeling. InfoSewer Pro adds comprehensive rainfall-runoff and infiltration/inflow modeling capability on top of the sanitary sewer simulation features provided by InfoSewer, equipping the industry with a single powerful tool that can be used for planning, design, and operational management of sanitary sewer systems, storm sewer systems, and combined sewer systems.
InfoSewer Pro shares all the functionality of InfoSewer including the methodologies used to model the physical and the non-physical components of a collection system, steady state and dynamic analysis of sanitary loads, steady state design, dynamic routing of flows through the collection system, calculation of HGLs, and water quality modeling. This section presents the theory pertinent to InfoSewer Pro.
There are various rainfall-runoff-modeling techniques. The choice of the method to use depends, among other considerations, on the type of analysis (e.g., steady state or dynamic simulation) and the information required (e.g., peak flow or complete hydrograph). Peak flow information is appropriate for steady state simulation of sewer systems whereas knowledge of the complete hydrograph is essential for dynamic simulations.
For estimation of peak flow during steady state simulations, InfoSewer Pro applies the Rational method, which is a very popular tool of choice used by many practicing engineers across the globe. For dynamic simulation, complete hydrographs are derived based on the practical and highly effective unit hydrograph theory. The unit hydrograph can be observed or synthetic. These methods allow the entire hydrograph (including peak and volume) resulting from an actual or design storm event to be adequately simulated.
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