posted on 2018-03-20, 11:09authored byPaul FlemingPaul Fleming, Matthew W. Frost, Murray R. Simpson, R. Everett, R.J. Gibbs
The drainage behavior of sports pitches has
traditionally been designed from experience
with hydraulic performance rarely measured
in detail. Within the wider industry and regulatory bodies there is a perception that storm water and increased drainage rates from sports pitches contribute to local flood risk. Empirical observations have suggested that in reality pitch drainage systems may discharge water at low volumes and rates and there is often limited surface run-off. Furthermore it appears that lack of technical guidance on the discharge of water from sport pitch drainage systems may have led to misunderstanding their drainage behavior and possible benefits they could bring to water management as opposed to perceived dis-benefits. This paper summarizes selected results of a case study which included field measurements of weather and discharge behavior on a range of natural turf sports pitches in England. The findings from this study indicate that natural turf sports pitches can provide resistance to flow and hence advantageous attenuation of rainfall
and storm water. Additionally sports pitches can store large volumes of water within the pervious materials used in their design. The study has confirmed that sport pitches demonstrate the key functions that are reflected in the design requirements of Sustainable Urban Drainage Systems (SuDs) such as pervious pavements providing source control of surface rain water.
Funding
This work was the part funded by Sport England and the Institute of Groundsmanship.
History
School
Architecture, Building and Civil Engineering
Published in
itsrj
Volume
13
Issue
1
Pages
649 - 656 (7)
Citation
FLEMING, P.R. ...et al., 2017. Drainage behavior of sports pitches–A case study review. International Turfgrass Society Research Journal, 13(1), pp. 649-656.
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
Acceptance date
2017-06-01
Publication date
2017-10-19
Notes
This paper was accepted for publication in the journal International Turfgrass Society Research Journal and the definitive published version is available at https://doi.org/10.2134/itsrj2016.06.0450