Sarah Moore - Research Associate/Data Officer

Telephone: 25767
Room: D105

email : s.moore@sheffield.ac.uk

Research Group

Research Project

The use of retrofit SUDS to unblock new developments.

Planning permission for new developments in the UK is dependent on access to water and sewer connections, or alternative onsite control systems. Increasingly, where developments are located within brown field areas or on the periphery of towns, the existing local sewers have no capacity for the additional storm water drainage. If suitable watercourses to accommodate the storm water discharge are not present, alternative systems must be employed before the area can be connected to the main drainage system. However, in some cases, the acceptable flows may be so low that the connection is impractical, resulting in potential development sites being `blocked´.

In many existing sewered catchments served by combined sewerage there may be potential to `free up´ local sewer capacity by disconnecting storm water at other locations upstream within other already developed parts of the catchment. Diversion of this flow before it enters the combined sewer into locally based infiltration and/or storage devices has been shown to be a viable approach in many cases (Swan, 2003). There are a range of SUDS (sustainable urban drainage systems) technologies that could be suitable for this `retrofit´ context.

The aim of my research is to investigate the relative sustainability of this approach (and SUDS themselves), particularly focusing on water quality parameters and ecological sustainability, and to develop decision support tools to assist the decision maker in determining where this approach is viable, utilising developments within Bradford and Glasgow as case study catchments.