Real-time controlled rainwater harvesting systems can improve the performance of stormwater networks

Real-Time Control (RTC) technology is increasingly applied in Rainwater Harvesting (RWH) systems to optimise their performance related to water supply and flood mitigation. However, most studies to date have focussed on testing the benefits at an individual site scale, leaving the potential benefits for downstream stormwater networks largely untested. In this study, we developed a methodology to predict how at-source RTC RWH systems influence the behaviour of a stormwater network. Simulation was enabled by coupling the drainage model in SWMM with an RTC RWH model coded using the R software. We modelled two different RTC strategies across a range of system settings (e.g. storage size for RWH and proportion of storage to which RTC is applied) under two different climate scenarios—current and future climates. The simulations showed that RTC reduced flooding volume and peak flow of the stormwater network, leading to a potential mitigation of urban flooding risks, while also providing a decentralised supplementary water supply. Implementing RTC in more of RWH storages yielded greater benefits than simply increasing storage capacity, in both current and future climates. More importantly, the RTC systems are capable of more precisely managing the resultant flow regime in reducing the erosion and restoring the pre-development conditions in sensitive receiving waters. Our study suggests that RTC RWH storages distributed throughout a catchment can substantially improve the performance of existing drainage systems, potentially avoiding or deferring expensive network upgrades. Investments in real-time control technology would appear to be more promising than investments in detention volume alone. © 2022