Lab-Scale Green Stormwater Infrastructure: Integrating Research and Teaching

An increase in rapidly expanding urbanization across the world has led to more impervious surfaces, increased stormwater runoff, peak flows, flooding events, pollution, and sewer overflows. Green stormwater infrastructure (GSI) is a management strategy that is most beneficial in developed/urbanized areas where stormwater quantity and quality are an issue. Over the past years, GSI has already been adopted by different cities and communities and there has been continued interest and research in the field. This project aims to build a lab-scale demonstration unit for various GSI techniques to raise awareness among students and the community on the design and merits of such approaches. Currently, we are building a rain garden that will be kept in the new environmental engineering laboratory at Juniata College. Multiple rain garden units will be built with different media types including activated carbon, gravel, silica sand, slag, and zeolite. This project will serve as a learning tool for students and will increase the breadth of the experimental possibilities at Juniata College. These units can also be integrated into courses like Water Quality, Environmental Sustainability, and Water and Wastewater Treatment as laboratory modules for Engineering and Science students at Juniata.