Beyond the black box: Developing a novel bioretention infiltration - treatment system for sustainable urban stormwater management

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Urban stormwater management is facing rising challenges due to increasing extreme weather events, pollution by nutrients, and contaminants of emerging concern. One solution is to implement Low Impact Development green technologies in order to intercept, reduce, and treat urban stormwater runoff. The proposed project will focus on a type of cost-effective infiltration-treatment systems: bioretention cells.**Bioretention cells provide an opportunity for the rapid infiltration of stormwater, thus protecting against flooding, and the treatment of intercepted runoff volumes, thus protecting the quality of water resources. Their performance is variable, the reasons for which are not understood. **This project aims to improve the efficiency and design of bioretention cells through a detailed characterization of the specific hydrological, chemical, and physical processes that govern their functioning. **This project will combine field work, laboratory experiments, engineering design, and modeling. Working as a team with our industrial partners and the regional public agencies, the project will train 4 Doctoral, 2 Master's, and 3 undergraduate students over the course of 3 years. This project will produce new knowledge that will be harnessed to design cost-effective and robust stormwater treatment systems in conjunction with private sector and public agency partners.******