- Dr Monzur Imteaz, Justin Taylor & Matthew Pateras, Swinburne University of Technology
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Swinburne University of Technology has constructed two underground rainwater tanks (having volumes of 185,000 L and 110,000 L) within it’s Hawthorn campus in Melbourne. The main purpose of these tanks is to capture stormwater from roofs of some buildings within the campus and re-use harvested water for the irrigation of grasses on the open green spaces. This paper investigates the effectiveness of these tanks to provide water for irrigation under different climatic conditions (dry year, average year and wet year). Also, a payback period analysis of the tanks is presented. Traditionally, this sort of analysis is performed based on average annual rainfall. However, analysis using long-term average rainfall will not depict the real situation. In reality the total annual rainfall is not evenly distributed over the year, rather it is the sum of several random events of different magnitudes. To overcome this drawback, an analysis using real rainfall data for three different climatic conditions have been used. Historic rainfall data was collected from Bureau of Meteorology for three different years i.e. dry year (1st decile), average year (5th decile) and wet year (9th decile). A spreadsheet based daily water balance model was developed considering daily rainfall data, total contributing roof area as catchment area, rainfall loss, available storage volume and irrigation water demand. Once available storage became full, excess runoff was assumed lost from the cycle. Analysis shows that these tanks are highly effective both in wet years and average years, also effective in dry years. A payback period analysis of the constructed tanks were preformed considering total construction cost of the tanks and estimated monetary value of water to be saved. For this analysis in regards of future climate a blended mix of dry year, average year and wet year in consecutive was assumed. It was found that for both the tanks, total construction costs can be saved within couple of years time.
BIO:
Dr Monzur Imteaz is working as a Senior Lecturer within Civil Engineering group of Swinburne University of Technology at Melbourne, Australia. He has received his B.Sc. in Civil Engineering from Bangladesh University of Engineering & Technology and M.Eng. in Water Resources Engineering from Asian Institute of Technology (Thailand). His excellent performances during Masters Program lead him to secure a prestigious Japanese Government Scholarship for doctoral study. He has completed his Ph.D. in 1997 on Lake Hydrodynamics, Destratification Process and Water Quality Modelling from Saitama University. After that he was working as a Water Quality Specialist with Institute of Water Modelling (Bangladesh). He was involved with several projects on flood & drainage studies, water quality monitoring & modelling in collaboration with Danish Hydraulic Institute (DHI) at Denmark. He has got extensive expertise on DHI developed softwares on Water & Environment. Later he has completed his post-doctoral research at University of Queensland, Brisbane. Before joining at Swinburne he has been involved with several Australian local and state government positions in Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria.
At Swinburne, Dr Imteaz is teaching subjects ‘Sustainable Design’, ‘Urban Water Resources’ and ‘Integrated Water Design’. Also, he has been actively involved with various researches on sustainability, water recycling, developing decision support tools, integrated catchment-stream-lake water modelling and waste water treatment.