Paper Title
A New Laboratory Scale Apparatus for Evaluation of Sports Field Drainage Process
Abstract
Sports field drainage has direct effects on quality of sports organization and increasing participation of people to sports facilities. Specifically, there were great numbers of cancellations regarding football organization due to insufficient drainage which was not to be removed fast enough from field surfaces during the play. This study aimed to develop a new lab-scale apparatus to investigate process of rainfall-drainage in the soil of sports field. The apparatus include two main parts which are rainfall simulator (RS) and drainage tank (DT). Simulating natural rainfall is considerably significant for especially laboratory-scale studies. The rainfall are used to simulate natural rainfall conditions at various intensities. Although most of the simulators were designed for constant intensity-rainfall, in this study various rainfall intensities were produced ranging from 25 mm/h to 55 mm/hr. The spatial uniformity of the artificial rainfall is sufficiently accurate to simulate the natural rainfall event. The drainage tank has two identical drainage compartment with different drainage layers. During the experiments drained water from the compartments were measured and drainage water hydrographs for corresponding rainfall hyetograph were recorded. The initial performance of experimental setup showed that it is sufficient to simulate natural rainfall and measure drainage water from each tanks. Initial results also showed that drainage layers in the compartments are distinctly effective on rates of water drainage through the layers.
Index Terms - Drainage, Rainfall Simulator, Sports Field.