Hydrologic Mass Balance Of Pervious Concrete Pavement With Sandy Soils

Use of pervious concrete pavement as a method of stormwater management has shown great promise in previous studies. Reduction in runoff, water quality improvements, and long-term economic benefits are but a few of its many advantages. Regulatory agencies such as the St. Johns River Water Management District require further research into the performance of pervious concrete pavement before granting credits for its use as a best management practice in controlling stormwater. As a part of a larger series of studies by UCF\u27s Stormwater Management Academy, this thesis studies the hydrologic mass balance of pervious concrete pavement in sandy soil common in Florida. In order to conduct this study, a field experiment was constructed at the UCF Stormwater Field Lab. The experiment consisted of three 4-foot tall cylindrical polyethylene tanks with 30-inch diameters. All three tanks were placed into the side of a small embankment and fitted with outlet piping and piezometers. The test tanks were assembled by laying a 6-inch layer of gravel into the bottom of each tank, followed by a layer of Mirafi geofabric, followed by several feet of fine sand into which soil moisture probes were laid at varying depths. Two of the tanks were surfaced with 6-inch layers of portland cement pervious concrete, while the third tank was left with a bare sand surface. Mass balance was calculated by measuring moisture influx and storage in the soil mass. Data collection was divided into three phases. The first phase ran from August to November 2005. Moisture input consisted of normal outdoor rainfall that was measured by a nearby rain gauge, and storage was calculated by dividing the soil mass into zones governed by soil moisture probes. The second phase ran for two weeks in March 2006. Moisture input consisted of water manually poured onto the top of each tank in controlled volumes, and storage was calculated by using probe readings to create regression trendlines for soil moisture profiles. The third phase followed the procedure identical to the second phase and was conducted in the middle of April 2006. Data tabulation in this study faced several challenges, such as nonfunctional periods of time or complete malfunction of essential measuring equipment, flaws in the method of calculating storage in phase one of the experiment, and want of more data points to construct regression trendlines for soil moisture calculation in phases two and three of the experiment. However, the data in all phases of the experiment show that evaporation volume of the tanks with pervious concrete surfacing was nearly twice that of the tank with no concrete. Subsequent infiltration experiments showed that pervious concrete pavement is capable of retaining a portion of precipitation volume, reducing infiltration into the underlying soil and increasing total evaporation in the system