An experimental and computational investigation of performance of the Green Gully for reusing stormwater

Abstract

A new stormwater quality improvement device called ‘Green Gully’ has been designed and developed in this study with the aim of reusing stormwater for irrigating trees and other plants. The main purpose of the Green Gully is to collect road runoff/stormwater, make it suitable for irrigation and provide an automated network system for watering roadside plants and irrigational areas. This paper presents the design and development of Green Gully along with experimental and computational investigations of the performance of Green Gully. Performance (in the form of efficiency, i.e. the percentage of water flow through the gully grate) was experimentally determined using a gully model in the laboratory first, then a three-dimensional numerical model was developed and simulated to predict the efficiency of Green Gully as a function of flow rate. Computational fluid dynamics code FLUENT was used for the simulation. GAMBIT was used for geometry creation and mesh generation. Experimental and simulation results are discussed and compared in this paper. The predicted efficiency was compared with the laboratory measured efficiency. It was found that the simulated results are in good agreement with the experimental results.