The Use of Vegetation to Engineer Rivers for Water Quality and Ecological Status

由于人口增长和气候变化的影响，英国和世界各地的水资源正面临越来越大的压力。在英国河流中维持可接受的水质、生态条件和供应安全是一项日益能源密集和昂贵的工作。为了满足日益严格的水质法规，预计水处理成本和碳排放将大幅增加。因此，迫切需要低能耗技术来改善河流水质。本提案利用申请人在环境水力学、湍流和混合领域的独特专业知识，提出一种新的科学方法，利用植被诱导的流动结构（称为混合层）来优化明渠中的混合率，从而迅速降低潜在有害污染物的峰值浓度。这将通过迅速降低污染物浓度的长期峰值来减少排放对生态的影响，并为昂贵的资产投资以及额外处理的能源和化学成本提供替代方案。该提案将利用谢菲尔德大学Pennine Water Group的实验设施来确定最佳植被特征（类型和配置），以实现最大的水质效益。通过提出和发展先进的环境流体力学科学，以解决工程和社会挑战，该提案代表了基于物理的综合水管理方法发展的一个步骤变化。这项工作将与主要的环境利益相关者合作进行，一旦基础科学建立起来，该项目将与这些合作伙伴合作，确定在实地条件下实施该方法的路线。

Water resources in the UK and around the world are under increasing strain from the effects of population growth and climate change. Maintaining acceptable water quality, ecological conditions and security of supply in UK rivers is an increasingly energy intensive and expensive exercise. A significant increase in water treatment costs and carbon emissions are expected in order to meet increasingly stringent water quality legislation. There is therefore an urgent requirement for low energy techniques to improve water quality in rivers. This proposal utilises the unique expertise of the applicant in the field of environmental hydraulics, turbulence and mixing to propose a new scientific methodology by which vegetation induced flow structures (termed mixing layers) are utilised to optimise mixing rates in open channels, thereby causing a rapid reduction in peak concentrations of potentially harmful pollutants. This will reduce the ecological impact of discharges by the rapid reduction of chronic peak pollutant concentrations and provide alternatives to costly asset investment and the energy and chemical costs of additional treatment. This proposal will utilise the experimental facilities within the Pennine Water Group at the University of Sheffield to determine the optimum vegetation characteristics (type and configuration) required to engineer maximum water quality benefits. By proposing and developing advanced environmental fluid mechanics science in order to tackle engineering and societal challenges the proposal represents a step change in the development of a physically based, integrated approach to water management. The work will be conducted in partnership with key environmental stakeholders, and once the underlying science has been established the project will work with these partners to identify routes to implementation of the methodology in field conditions.