Innovative way to prevent flooding and water shortage
Together with a consortium of companies, AAWS is demonstrating an innovative way to prevent flooding and water shortages at the Green Village site of the Technical University of Delft. These situations that are increasingly occurring in the Netherlands as a result of climate change.
How it works
Rainwater from roofs is collected and stored in a Rainwater Wall (RwW) having a volume of 6m3. This custom-made steel tank is equipped with sensors and automatic valves that can send the collected water to various applications using a pump.
Rainwater applications
A ‘Green Wall’ has been built against one of the walls.The Green Wall is a ‘vertical garden’ that, like the lawns on the Green Village site, receives water from the RwW. In addition, Mijn a rainwater purification plant is installed with which rainwater can be purified for flushing toilets, washing clothes and showering. This installation also makes it possible to produce drinkable rainwater, but due to strict Dutch regulations we are not allowed to demonstrate this at the moment.
Sewer disconnection and an adaptive control system
Heavy rain showers are increasingly causing sewers to overflow and flooding. The nuisance can be reduced by ‘disconnecting’ roofs from the sewer system during heavy rainfall. At Green Village we demonstrate that the RwW can also be used for this purpose. We do this using an adaptive computer-controlled control that uses the current weather situation on the Green Village site, as well as the weather forecasts of the KNMI for the weather situation in the long term.
Disconnection works as follows
If heavy rain showers are approaching, the control system ensures that water from the RwW is discharged into the sewer that is not yet overloaded. As a result, the buffer capacity of the RwW system increases, a maximum amount of rainwater can be buffered, thereby preventing pollution of the sewer.