Hydrologically Enhanced Distributed Urban Drainage Model and Its Application in Beijing City

Abstract

Heavy rainfall-induced inundation is becoming more serious in urban areas making it necessary to urgently appraise and redesign the infrastructure system to drain the storm water more efficiently. For the complex urban drainage systems that include street, sewer, and ditch/river networks, a sophisticated urban drainage model is required to facilitate optimal planning and management. Although most existing models simulate the runoff generation process in a simpler manner and treat the drainage connections between runoff generation cells and the corresponding drainage links in a rigid/static manner, this study proposes a new hydrologically enhanced distributed urban drainage model. In the new model, the urban area is discretized into a four-layer network, i.e., two-dimensional (2D) grid network, 1D street network, 1D sewer network, and 1D ditch/river network. Physically based equations are utilized to describe water movement along the four networks, i.e., the 1D Richards equation is used to simulate the infiltration process along the vertical direction in the grid network, the 2D Saint-Venant equation is used to simulate the overland flow process along the planar direction in the grid network, and the 1D Saint-Venant equation is used to simulate the street, sewer, and river flows in the remaining networks. The new model incorporates the state-of-the-art physical descriptions about hydraulic and hydrological processes during the urban storm inundation period, which allows a more realistic depiction of the runoff generation processes, automatic alteration of overland flow routing path, direct and easier usage of gridded radar rainfall data readily available recently, and real-time hydrodynamic flux exchanges between surface and sewer pipes. The model is validated in a hypothetical application by comparing with the published literature results. Also, a real urban watershed application shows the capacity of the model to provide reasonable predictions of the outlet hydrograph, which indicates its potential for planning and real-time management of urban drainage systems.