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Pervious Pavers: Where is the Perviousness?

Published by the American Society of Agricultural and Biological Engineers, St. Joseph, Michigan www.asabe.org

Citation:  International Symposium on Erosion and Landscape Evolution (ISELE), 18-21 September 2011, Anchorage, Alaska  711P0311cd Paper #11110.(doi:10.13031/2013.39292)
Authors:   Elizabeth A Pappas, Chi-hua Huang
Keywords:   Urban runoff, Pavement, Infiltration, Runoff, Surface sealing

To help minimize the negative hydrologic impacts of urbanization, such as increased flooding and decreased time of concentration, urban best management practices (BMPs) are continually being developed. Several BMPs have been developed to allow infiltration on certain transportation surfaces. Among others, these include substituting traditional pavement with pervious pavers. Gaps between paver blocks typically represent about 3-30% perviousness by area. In addition, some paver blocks are themselves permeable through open pore spaces, in theory increasing the overall permeability of the system. This comes however at a cost in terms of durability, especially under freezing or heavier traffic conditions. Surface sealing by fine particles deposited by water, wind, trees, or vehicles may result in reduction or elimination of infiltration in between and / or within paver blocks. To test the extent to which this phenomenon can influence runoff and infiltration dynamics, a series of laboratory rainfall simulations was performed on pairs of soil boxes (1.0 x 0.6 x 0.2 m each). One box was equipped with a pervious paver system (with either permeable or impermeable blocks) and located down slope from a second soil box representing an erodible soil surface area. Rainfall representing a 5-yr return period storm was simulated and timed runoff and infiltration samples were collected to determine discharge rates of water and sediment from each 1-m long section. Surface runoff and deep percolation were collected from pervious block (PB) and impervious block (IB) paver systems, and average steady state infiltration rates are given in Figure 1. Eleven consecutive rainfall simulation events were performed, 24-72 hours apart.

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