Abstract
Urban rainwater reuse preserves water resources and promotes sustainable development in rapidly growing urban areas. The efficiency of a large number of urban water reuse systems, operating under different climate and demand conditions, is evaluated here on the base of a new risk analysis approach. Results obtained by probability analysis (PA) indicate that maximum efficiency in low demanding scenarios is above 0.5 and a threshold, distinguishing low from high demanding scenarios, indicates that in low demanding scenarios no significant improvement in performance may be attained by increasing the storage capacity of rainwater harvesting tanks. Threshold behaviour is displayed when tank storage capacity is designed to match both the average collected volume and the average reuse volume. The low demand limit cannot be achieved under climate and operating conditions characterized by a disproportion between harvesting and demand volume.
Highlights
Sustainable water resource management is an urgent task in evolving land where the population grows in rapidly expanding urban areas [1,2]
The tank size affects the cost of the rain water harvesting (RWH) system and the optimum storage capacity is achieved when no significant improvement of performance may be attained by increasing size and costs
Risk of overflow, Efficiency and Demand Ratio are estimated based on probability analysis (PA) for a large number of RWH systems designed to perform their task under different climate and operating conditions
Summary
Sustainable water resource management is an urgent task in evolving land where the population grows in rapidly expanding urban areas [1,2]. Urban water reuse is a key process of urban hydrology, since it closes the water cycle [4] in environments where soil and atmosphere are disconnected by large and highly populated impervious areas [5,6,7]. Rainwater harvesting tanks are expected to provide reuse-water according to demand with limited overflow, avoiding the loss of water resources. Efficiency of rain water harvesting (RWH) systems is commonly evaluated by numerical continuous simulation (CS) of daily, weekly or monthly water balance within behavioural models. Abdulla and Al-Shareef [8] evaluate the efficiency of RWH cisterns for various domestic uses in Jordan based on averaged monthly precipitation data. Ghisi et al [9]
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