Hydraulic Test of a Bioretention Media Carbon Amendment
Publication: Journal of Hydrologic Engineering
Volume 15, Issue 6
Abstract
Rain gardens effectively remove some stressors from storm water, but in most cases they show much smaller removal rates of nitrate, likely due to the high sand and low organic matter content of rain garden media inhibiting denitrification. A bench-scale experiment was conducted to test the drainage capability of media containing shredded newspaper layers as a carbon amendment. Storm water was introduced at low and high rates to bins containing zero, one, and two layers of newspaper at varying depths. While there were differences in effluent volumes and flow rates between control and newspaper treatments, surface ponding occurred in all three treatments, suggesting that some other factor besides the newspaper had an effect on drainage properties. Grain size and clay mineralogy analyses indicated the migration of finer particles into the deeper soils, which could have inhibited drainage.
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Acknowledgments
This research at the Urban Watershed Management Branch, Edison, N.J., is supported by the Office of Research and Development, U.S. EPA. We thank Clarence Smith, John Lapinski, Christa Casciolini, and Mike Cerrato at PARS Environmental for the sample collection under EPA Contract No. UNSPECIFIEDEP-C-04-064. We also thank Kirk Scheckel at EPA’s LRPCD for conducting the clay mineralogy analysis.
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Information & Authors
Information
Published In
Journal of Hydrologic Engineering
Volume 15 • Issue 6 • June 2010
Pages: 531 - 536
Copyright
© 2010 ASCE.
History
Received: Dec 23, 2008
Accepted: Jun 23, 2009
Published online: Jun 27, 2009
Published in print: Jun 2010
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