Hydraulic Study of the South Carolina DOT Catch Basin Type 25
Proper design of surface drainage of both rural and urban highways is essential to minimize flooding and provide traffic safety. Inlets collect the excess storm water from a roadway and discharge it to storm drains. Knowing the performance of inlets (or hydraulic efficiency), defined as the percentage of intercepted flow to the total street flow, is necessary in the design of inlet spacing. The location of inlets can be determined such that the system can transport all or a majority of the road surface flow during rain events. A new type of a catch basin with an inlet grate, Type 25 (CB25), to use as drainage on South Carolina’s freeways was designed by the South Carolina Department of Transportation engineers. Because it is a new design, a study was necessary to establish the hydraulic capacity of the grate. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) modeling was chosen for this purpose, instead of more expensive and time consuming laboratory testing. CFD has been widely used in design of new transportation infrastructure, as well as performance analysis of the existing structures. Three dimensional computational fluid dynamic simulations were developed by scientists at Argonne’s Transportation Research and Analysis Computing Center with the use of high performance cluster computing. The work was performed under an inter-agency agreement between the U.S. Department of Transportation and the U.S Department of Energy and funded by the South Carolina Department of Transportation.