How does storm drainage work?

Part 2! Hydrology Engineer is so much more than a game, it is actual drainage engineering software, made accessible (as long as you have $150!) It will teach you how to design real drainage, I should have just played this than spend 10 years learning that I did!

LINKS!

Epic Game Store Support-A-Creator Code: RCE

(In connection with Epic Games’ Support-A-Creator Program, I may receive a commission from certain in-game purchases)

#realcivilengineer #engineering #hydrologyengineer

[tnb_jew]

petition for more of this game so the editor can keep his job.

[Max_Ivanov_Pro]

I never thought I'd be so interested in drainage engineering, but here we are. Keep nerding out, Matt!

[gaysarahk]

I'm glad the devs gave you the full game, Matt! You deserve it! Especially after giving them so much free publicity that they thought they were being targeted. :)

[Wistfuldragon]

"Hope it's not too boring." He says as I sat here and barely finished my meal in the 35 minutes it took to watch. But really, seeing the immense engineering and work that goes into what we take for granted is always a fascinating time. The common person doesn't consider everything that goes into making a drainage network, they just think "Why does it take them half a week to just put pipes in the ground?" It's really cool, and I'd love to see more.

[gaysarahk]

Hydrology Engineer again! Like I said last time, it's great to see a game where Matt can just nerd out and be Matt.

[YeOlde_Monk]

No joke, this is actually really addicting to watch. I love how you get really nerdy about the drainage, it's something you never really see in other videos. Hopefully you'll make another one of these as well

[SynSpiderz]

I can't be the only one who enjoys the more serious RCE videos over the less serious videos

[TRAILLER]

Of course the last video done well. My uncle (who worked in the same field as you) said that one of his ex colleague who became a teacher referenced your video to his pupils. He (my uncle) said "that RCE guy did a good explanation that even a layman would get" then he got on a tangent about contractors cutting corners and the blame falling at the engineer feet.

[TheRealOxidan]

I'd love to see the 2 hour plus unedited video honestly.

[elfreaknaeash]

As entertaining and efficient as your content normally is, this is just really freakin' interesting. Kind of like 'how it's made', a professional explaining things you just hadn't considered giving a real appreciation next time you're driving down a road and notice none of the manhole covers are in the middle.

[stump]

And then someone changes the roadway profile a few days before submittal and you have to work all night to redo everything. The life of the drainage engineer.

[joshmartinez]

“Like… it’s nonsense.” Lol Matt gets real sassy when he talking about his actual work. I love it. “Personally, I’d use common sense” I’m dying.

[Decithe]

I'm glad you returned to this! In the previous video you were worried that folks would find it boring, but I find it to be quite a fascinating subject. You're clearly very excited to share your previous work and knowledge with everyone, and your explanations are energetic and easy to follow. Thank you, Matt and Editor!

[CarlsonSWEdTech]

Oh my, here we go again. Glory to the editor!
Matt, thank you again. I enjoyed this video. I learned quite a bit about some of the thoughts that go on in UK.


I'd love if someone could summarize some of the rules you have to consider.
... site note. I just realized that my google dictionary was set to UK. I was confused about some of the spell check squigglies I was getting on commenting.
Ok back to it.

I wanted to just give a stream of thoughts and comments on this awesome video. I enjoyed watching this as much as you all.
1.2m is new to me.

The game has a concept of jurisdictional constraints.
Currently all levels are set to my local constraint which is 8ft gutter spread (technically its based on 1/2 road lane width + paved shoulders and gutter)
When you start the game there is a tablet screen that explains the rules and penalties. The idea is that we wanted to be able to swap out your ruleset/penalties
based on your jurisdiction. This isn't 100%, as you can imagine there are so many jurisdictions. We have found that some engineers might only ever do projects in a single jurisdiction but even local vs state can be different. Residential vs highway can be different.

Another one I've been told about is that while locally here we are allowed to daisy-chain catchbasins(gullys) together, even parts of the US like Florida, or in Dublin, Ireland you are not allowed to. All must connect to a main trunk like Matt showed in the video. The idea is so that if one drain clogs it doesn't effect the whole network. Brilliant!

We don't have this double gully. If you have the low points turned on your structures will snap to the low point. Locally again this is a requirement that you have a catchbasin at the low point and flanking ones based on water depth. Maybe the double gully could be a single structure. I noticed the if you don't place one at the low point but rather on either side, depending on the distance and the longitudinal slope you might be calculating on grade spread vs sag spread.

We have several sized grates as well as 10ft curb boxes but they are not available on this site. Actually I have modeled a bunch of DOT approved headwalls as well but they are not in game yet. A lot of these are ordered from local suppliers due to the weight and cost of shipping. If anyone has favorite local suppliers let me know so I can get their catalog.

The streams of water going over the curbs are placed wherever a large amount of water is contributing to the peak flow. We added those because sometimes it was hard to communicate why spread would jump up almost instantly.

We do take into account the entire sub-catchment when calculating our flow. We're show the longest flowline for each which can be up to three parts. Red is sheet flow, Yellow is shallow flow and black is channel flow. The rule we've set up is you can have up to 100ft of sheet flow. Once you hit the driveway or drop into the curb it should be channel flow and then everything in between is shallow flow. Our professional tools allow a lot of customization here.
I'd be curious to hear what others think on this.

Modeling spread at driveways isn't the same as modeling gutterspread. We have several ways we can do it from doing a linear segment between the values on each side to a cubic estimation or doing a V channel calculation. The V channel led to interesting reductions in gutterspread at the driveway but then it would increase again just after. This was due to some driveways being flatter than others and the water naturally filled that area leading into less depth. It might be more accurate but it didn't look right. I want to build a physical model to study this. There was an issue also if the driveway was too flat you'd get a massive pond. Using a linear estimate is used on most and the cubic one is used on some of the cul de sac driveways which help accounts for the curve of the curb line.

One last thought...
The pipes have a min/max cover rule as well as a clearance rule. This level doesn't have utilities but in the others your pipes must be 12" underground minimum. They also must be 15" below supply water and 15" above sanitary sewer lines. The slope shows as negative which is just how we at Carlson show downhill but I have heard of and seen plans that don't show negative. its -0.10% so 1/10th of 1% which is another local rule. We have a max slope of -10%. All the pipes are imperial spec pipes. The metric measurements were added for metric users that didn't understand our confusing system of units and measures. We will be adding actual metric spec pipes so the sizes won't look weird (unless you switch your settings to imperial). I have found that the metric pipe measurements aren't standardized and actually different per country. So my question for all of you non-US engineers is what is your size gapping in pipes. What is the smallest pipe you have for storm sewer drainage (materials?) and do they go up in 50mm increments? at which point does the size gap change to 100mm or 200mm increments? All of our pipes are modeled with actual thickness, flare length, overlap amounts (in the case of RCP). We only have a single RCP class right now but I spoke with an engineer recently about load values and how deep a pipe must be vs its diameter to hold the load of traffic.

Ok my coffee has gotten cold now. Thanks again to Matt (and the editor supreme) for taking their time on this video. Thank you to all of you that have left just amazing comments and feedback on this video and the last one. I along with several of my colleagues have been reading each and every one of them. And thanks to you Carlson customers that have reached out to your local dealer or sales person. I love having them run up to my office and tell me that someone reached out about this passion project game we built.

One more last thought...
We hear you about the price and the desire to have it on a platform like steam. I can't release this game as is on steam, but thanks to all of these comments and the amazing videos we have started the conversation of what the steam puzzle version of the game looks like. After i reheat my coffee I'll be working on that. Give me your thoughts on what you'd like to see. Any thanks to all of you who have purchased this game. I can't wait to share with you some of these amazing updates we've been working on.

[Taolan]

We like seeing you do well at things, Matt.

Bet the dev didn't expect a training sim to get so much attention from gamers, but let's face it we'll make a game out of anything. There's literally competitions for making spreadsheets.

[jonathantimmerman]

I appreciate the fast talking industry terms, and dialback explanations. Its like a cheat sheet on how to respect someone else's expertise. Kudos for being so invested in this vid that you forgot to show perfectly normal; totally not unusual: completely appropritate suggestive shapes. The fact that you said this is a "more accurate" simluation immediately made me want to see the "real criminal engineer" version where you (*probably without much technical explanation) show us just how bad things could get if you wanted to flood this neighborhood completely to buy the land cheap. You do amazing videos so I hope they are as fun to make as they are to watch. Keep at it.

[iCharFK]

The way you talk about all this engineering work, is really what sells this video and the last one. Sure, some of use want random information that doesn't really effect us. But, others, they're here because they enjoy your content and how you do it. Keep on keeping on :)

[LizBee]

My wife is a civil engineer and does this every day. It's been fun to watch these and follow along from what little I've picked up listening to her talk about her job over the years. Love it, keep them coming!

[Niyucuatro]

Maybe it's because i studied engineering too (Telecomunications in my case) and i ended up woirking in coding. This brings me back nice memories of working on assignments in different suimulation programs.

The editor might have complained. But i think i would have even enjoyed the 2 hours of raw footage.

[jsndwn]

I don’t know why, but when a professional talks about their work with such passion I’m on the hook to watch. Thanks Matt!