Handbook of Environmental Engineering

14Design of Porous Pavements for Improved Water Quality and Reduced Runoff

Will Martin¹, Milani Sumanasooriya², Nigel B. Kaye³, and Brad Putman³

¹ General Engineering Department, Clemson University, Clemson, SC, USA

² Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering, Clarkson University, Potsdam, NY, USA

³ Glenn Department of Civil Engineering, Clemson University, Clemson, SC, USA

Clean water regulations, flood risk in urban areas, and other environmental concerns have led to the creation and adoption of low impact development (LID) technologies and best management practices (BMP) for land development. LID/BMP technologies include infiltration trenches, rain gardens, green roof systems, bioretention cells, cisterns, rain barrels, and porous pavements (Field et al., 2004). The primary goals of many of these LID systems are to retain the water quality volume for a given land development (Akan and Houghtalen, 2003) and reduce downstream sediment loads through retention or filtration (Urbonas and Stahre, 1993). The secondary goals of these systems are to reduce the total runoff and peak discharge from a watershed for a given rainfall event and to increase stormwater infiltration and groundwater recharge compared with traditional land development stormwater management practices. The focus of this chapter is on the design and installation of porous pavement systems as an LID/BMP technology to improve water quality and reduce runoff.

14.1 Introduction

Porous pavements are essentially ...