Experimental study of the air emission effect in the tangential and the multi-stage spiral inlet

Recently, urban inundation was frequently occurred due to the intensive rainfall exceeding marginal capacity of the flood control facility. Furthermore, needs for the underground storage facilities to mitigate urban flood are increasing according to rapidly accelerating urbanization. Thus, in this study, drainage efficiency in drain tunnel connecting to underground storage was investigated from the air-core measurements in the drop shaft against two types of inlet structure. In case of the spiral inlet, the multi-stage structure is introduced at the bottom of the inlet to improve the vortex induction effect at low inflow discharge (multi-stage spiral inlet). The average cross-sectional area of the air-core in the multi-stage spiral inlet is 10% larger than the tangential inlet, and show the highly air emission effect and the highly inflow efficiency at the high inflow discharge. In case of the tangential inlets, the air emission effect decreased after exceeding the maximum inflow discharge, which is required to maintain the inherent performance of the tangential inlet. From the measurements, the empirical formula for the cross-sectional area of the air-core according to locations inside the drop shaft was proposed in order to provide the experimental data available for the inlet model used in experiments.