LABORATORY EXPERIMENTS ON PERMEABLE PAVEMENTS

In recent decades, permeable pavements have been increasingly being adopted in urban environments for stormwater management. Both small scale laboratory models and monitoring of real case studies are present in literature. However, even though the former are easy to build and manage, lacks in the representation of the physical processes that occur on real scale, whereas for the latter the definition of the boundary conditions as well as the installation and management of the sensors, make cumbersome the evaluation on the short‐ and long‐term performances. In this study, we describe a large‐scale physical model of a permeable pavement in an urban context, designed to reproduce the physical processes close to the ones occurring at the real scale. In the model the upstream portion is maintained impermeable to reproduce runoff generation conveying the water (and in case washed off sediments) that infiltrate in the downstream permeable pavement. After designing the filter package beneath the permeable blocks, several sensors have been installed in the layers of the subsurface to assess the evolution in time of the water table and of the above degree of saturation. The system has been preliminarily tested through nine laboratory experiments during which rainfall events characterized by different intensities and durations have been generated using a properly designed rainfall simulator. Results from the experiments allow to obtain a preliminary assessment about the efficiency of a newly constructed permeable pavement system.