Ricerc@Sapienza

Transformation of urban areas satisfies hydraulic invariance (HI) if the maximum flow rate outgoing
the area stays unchanged. The HI can be respected by dimensioning appropriate water storage
volumes or low impact developments (LID) to balance the soil sealing and ground levelling effects.
In order to comply with HI, some Italian regional legislation and river basin authority provide for
the creation of storage tanks whose volume must be estimated through simple conceptual rainfallrunoff
models. In this work a physically based approach for evaluating HI is proposed. It is based on
interpolating the results from a large number of hydraulic simulations conducted using FullSWOF,
which is an open source code developed by the University of Orléans. In this software the shallow
water equations are solved using a finite volume scheme and friction laws and infiltration models
are included. Simulations have been carried out considering the effect of three properties of the
area, that is: the saturated hydraulic conductivity of soil, the slope of ground surface and the standard
deviation of ground elevation around the mean level. Using the results, interpolating laws for
the peak discharge and the critical rainfall duration as function of the three basin parameters have
been derived. A parametric hydrograph as a function of the basin parameters and rainfall duration
is defined and a HI evaluation method based on routing the parametric hydrograph is proposed.
The results from this approach have been compared with those from non-physically based methods
currently used, such as the direct rainfall approach and the linear reservoir approach. The comparison
shows that the difference between these conceptual methods with that one proposed here
is strongly dependent on the runoff coefficient value. It is also not possible to predict whether they
are conservative or not.