Virtual Lab for Drainage Structure Simulations

Urban drainage systems need to transport large volumes of runoff due to more extreme rainfall events and under climate warming scenarios. Engineers implement more innovative drainage inlet design to intercept more surface runoff, but some design curves are not available and physical lab experiments are expensive and time-consuming. Virtual lab experiments using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations could be alternative options. Also, existing design aids (equations/charts) were developed with limited data and under certain assumptions, and they need to be further verified. Three-dimensional CFD simulations were conducted first on some traditional drainage inlets (grate, curb, and combined inlets) in HEC-22 to verify the CFD results and identify deficiencies in design equations. Various innovative drainage systems and inlet designs as case studies are further modeled using CFD virtual lab experiments, which show promising results and rich information for future drainage design innovations.