UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Stormwater runoff has become one of the leading causes of water pollution in urban environments, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, due to years of cities implementing “gray” infrastructure. Stuart Echols, associate professor of landscape architecture in the College of Architecture’s Stuckeman School, is working to rectify this with the support of the recently awarded 2024 Stuckeman Fund for Collaborative Design Research Grant for $50,000 over the course of two years.
This type of infrastructure involves collecting and directing stormwater from impervious surfaces – such as roadways, parking lots and rooftops – into a series of piping that ultimately discharges untreated stormwater into a local water body.
Green stormwater infrastructure (GSI) systems, however, are designed to mimic nature and capture rainwater where it falls, thus reducing and treating stormwater at its source. GSI has become more popular in urban areas in recent decades as the economic, social and environmental benefits of the systems have become realized.
Landscape architects, civil engineers and architects, however, need to develop better ways to model water and pollution flow in GSI systems so designers can create, evaluate and understand their options more efficiently and economically.
This is where Echols’ project comes in.
The two-year study compares on-line GSI facilities, in which all water and pollution volume is accepted by a GSI facility, to off-line GSI facilities, where only a certain portion of the water and pollution volume is accepted by the facility and the additional volume is diverted.
“The ultimate goal of this work is to create reliable in-office protocols for designers to explore the effectiveness of pollution capture of different GSI solutions,” Echols said. “This will allow designers to create and test many new GSI design innovations.”
The research team — which includes José Pinto Duarte, Stuckeman Chair in Design Innovation and director of the Stuckeman Center for Design Computing, and Matthew Royer, associate director of partnerships and engagement and director of the Agriculture and Environment Center in the College of Agricultural Sciences — will use computational fluid dynamics (CFD), a computer-based fluid modeling software that simulates the flow of a fluid and how it interacts with different modeled surfaces. It will be used to simulate water flow and pollution capture in both on-line and off-line GSI facilities.
The resulting workflow protocol will be used to evaluate and optimize design elements including flumes, inlets, outflows and more for their effect on capturing floating oils and sinking sediments in the water.
The results will be used to evaluate the success of the CFD simulations protocol, compare the ability of off-line to on-line GSI systems to capture the two pollutants and to determine how the capture rates of pollutants are affected by different GSI designs.