Resumen de Flood control in urban areas through the rehabilitation of drainage networks
Leonardo Bayas Jiménez
Currently, most of the world's population lives in cities and this trend is expected to continue, moving more rural population to urban areas every year. This phenomenon is mainly due to the economic development that is generated in the cities. These conditions pose significant challenges for cities in terms of planning and management. If the growth of urbanization is properly managed, it can contribute to sustainable growth, increasing productivity and people's standard of living. However, it cannot be overlooked that the growth of cities implies an impact on the environment. One of the problems that causes the most concern is the expansion of cities that replace the green and agricultural spaces that surround the cities with streets and impermeable structures. This process decreases the capacity of the soil to absorb water in a rain event, increasing runoff and the risk of flooding. If adding to this problem of cities the undeniable climate change that increases the frequency of extreme rainfall events in certain areas of the planet, the adaptation of the infrastructure of cities to make them safer is an urgent need.
Drainage systems are essential infrastructures, designed to capture and transport water produced by precipitation, their proper functioning generates security and wellness for people, while inadequate functioning is associated with risk and vulnerability. Under climate change scenarios, these structures, which were designed for lower flows, do not guarantee the effective evacuation of water, making cities vulnerable to floods that can generate social and economic losses. To mitigate these impacts, different measures have been developed, such as the so-called Best Management Practices or the installation of Low Impact Development etc. However, these measures are not enough to control the peak flow of extreme rainfall. Adapting the existing network to the new climatic conditions is presented as an ideal alternative for flood control in the urban environment. Expanding the capacity of the network by changing the size of the pipes for others with a larger diameter has been the traditional approach that has been used for many years. The inclusion of storm tanks in the system is a measure that was later adopted to provide it with greater resilience to extreme rainfall peaks. Unfortunately, the construction of these structures in the environment entails great difficulty due to the size of the intervention, the time, and the cost. In this context, the present work presents a novel way of improving drainage networks combining the replacement of pipes, the installation of storm tanks in the drainage network and also includes elements of hydraulic control in the drainage network. With these actions it is considered that the rehabilitation of the network will be more efficient in technical and economic terms. To achieve this, an optimization model created from a modified genetic algorithm connected to the SWMM model through a toolkit is used. The optimization model focuses on minimizing the cost of the required infrastructure and the costs associated with flooding. Posing the problem in this way, an objective function is defined composed of cost functions that will be evaluated to find the best solutions. The development of different steps to obtain an efficient methodology, the strategies to reduce calculation times and computational effort, the economic analysis of floods and the required structures are detailed in each chapter of this thesis.
