Water harvesting – reason for failure

In the pursuit of designing a flawless rain water harvesting design, team SILVERON focused on choked and non functional structures to understand the reasons of failure.

It was observed that artificial ground water recharge systems designed with slotted pipe work efficiently in the first few days of rain and there after their intake efficiency reduces rapidly and finally water starts holding in them.

slotted-designs-structures
Slotted-pipe design based rainwater harvesting structures

Our study of the problem showed that in this structure design the rain water is directed to flow into the pipe with slots. This water fills the pipe and moves out of the slots to fill  the space outside the pipe and form a water column around the pipe up to the same level as that of the column inside the pipe.

The soil particles get suspended in the water column outside & both columns recede simultaneously. The suspended silt deposits inside as well as outside the pipe, blocking the slots at the last part of the pipe.  With every inflow of water, this process is repeated till all the slots in the pipe is chocked with silt and finally the pipe becomes a closed pipe – This invariably leads to system failure.                                                                             

In this system, it is expected that mother earth will absorb water as soon as it comes out of the slots while ignoring the basic principle of nature that ‘water seeks it own level’ at the first opportunity.