PondPack

Automatic Design with PondMaker

One of the most difficult and time-consuming aspects of detention pond design is managing the sequence of steps required to take a pond from blank page to final design.

PondPack's PondMaker guides you through the confusing maze of pond design steps by providing a step-by-step process that gives you constant feedback on how your design is progressing.

Set maximum outflow rate: You can explicitly set the allowable pond outflow rate, or let PondMaker automatically apply pre-developed conditions for multiple storm events.

Estimate storage: Know the size of your pond before laying out the first grading plan. PondMaker leverages PondPack's precision estimate tools to establish the maximum storage requirements.

Check outlet design: PondMaker greatly reduces design iterations by automatically computing a target rating curve based on storage requirements, grading plan data, and allowable outflow rates for multiple return events

Check final design: PondMaker processes full routing results to report maximum outflow, storage, water surface elevation, and freeboard for multiple design events.

Pond Routing

Pond routing is a mathematical procedure that models a detention pond’s response to a given storm event. By routing a stormwater hydrograph through a pond, engineers can determine how the water surface elevation, outflow, and storage values vary during and after the storm event of interest.

Options include routing a single pond, multiple ponds, interconnected ponds, and variable tailwater conditions. PondPack also allows you to model unlimited diversions by computing flow splits for ponds with multiple outfalls.

Pond Sizing and Pond Volume

Pond Sizing

With PondPack, you can get your grading plan right the first time by automatically determining storage requirements and pond dimensions using developed pond inflow and target outflow rates. Solve for surface area, depth, or underground pipe size.

Size your pond in two easy steps:

1. Use PondPack’s sophisticated Storage Estimator to trim hours off of grading plan efforts by estimating storage requirements and pond dimensions before laying out the first pond contour.
2. Check to see if your pond grading plan meets storage requirements using PondPack’s automated volume calculation tools for a variety of pond shapes.

Pond Volume

Once PondPack has estimated the size and dimensions of your pond, simply plug in your design data.

PondPack offers several format options for entering pond volume data, giving you the flexibility to easily model a wide variety of pond configurations. Volume data formats include elevation versus contour area, elevation versus planimeter area, and elevation versus volume data. You can even model underground storage by using multiple-barrel circular pipes on grade or entering geometric parameters for trapezoidal basins.

Outlet Design

PondPack uses the industry-standard Hydraulic Design Series No. 5 methods from the FHWA to automatically perform outlet calculations.

With PondPack, you can model complex outlets in parallel and series for a variety of tailwater conditions and automatically check for inlet or outlet control. Include weirs, orifices, culverts, risers, inlet boxes, and any user-defined structure in your design. You can then generate single, multi-stage, or complex rating curves for interconnected pond analysis.

Water Quality Best Management Practices (BMP)

Many reviewers are now requiring additional BMP calculations governing water quality.

PondPack can quickly calculate first-flush volume – the initial portion of the storm that flushes off pollutant particles that have accumulated since the previous rainfall event. Detaining stormwater for longer periods allows more time for particulates to settle out of the system. Test your pond design for minimum drain time performance, or select from a variety of detention time methods, including peak-to-peak, centroid-to-centroid, and weighted average plug flow.

PondPack also addresses water quality issues surrounding infiltration by offering a variety of infiltration options in ponds and reaches.

Channel Routing

PondPack gives you a variety of options for modeling hydrologically significant channel reaches within a watershed network.

Attenuate flows and account for travel time by routing hydrographs through geometrically shaped channels such as pipes and trapezoidal ditches, or through irregularly shaped natural channel sections. Available channel routing methods include Muskingum, Translation, and Modified Puls.

Interconnected Pond Modeling (ICPM)

In many scenarios, downstream conditions cause backwater effects that influence performance of detention pond outlet structures. A pond may discharge to another pond that is close in elevation, or to a location influenced by downstream tidal effects or flooding. These situations can be extremely difficult to model correctly.

Some approaches simplify the problem through overly conservative assumptions about downstream water surface elevations that can result in oversized facilities and excessive costs. Others ignore the downstream effects entirely, resulting in overtopping of undersized ponds.

With PondPack’s advanced ICPM capabilities, there is no need to compromise the integrity of your solution. Leveraging the technically sound algorithms native to PondPack, you can model these complex scenarios with confidence.

Hydrology

Rainfall data: PondPack can handle an unlimited number of synthetic or real storm events of any duration or distribution. Choose any standard and regionalized methods such as: SCS 24-hour Type I, IA, II, and III rainfall distributions, Bulletin 70 and 71 rainfall distribution data for the Midwest U.S., gauged rainfall data, rainfall curves created from I-D-F data, I-D-F curves, and more.

Infiltration and runoff computations: Choose from the SCS Runoff CN method, Green-Ampt equation, Horton equation, initial and average infiltration rates, user-defined infiltration equations, and more.

Time of concentration calculator: Calculate Tc quickly and accurately, even when there are several possible flow paths to consider. Set up different "what-if" situations for various assumptions to remove the guesswork in finding the most representative Tc, or directly insert your own value.

Peak flow and hydrograph methods: Use the SCS Graphical Peak Discharge method, the rational method, or generate and add an unlimited number of hydrographs throughout your watershed.

Reporting and Graphing

Reporting

PondPack's advanced automated report building technology will help you to quickly and automatically create a complete or summarized easy-to-read drainage report that includes a comprehensive table of contents and an index.

A tree view of all available reports allows users to click items on and off and combine graphs to their report. These reports can even be opened outside of PondPack.

Create concise executive summaries for paper output, or burn a CD with hundreds of pages of detailed input data, intermediate calculations, and final results. PondPack CD reports provide reviewers with a convenient and searchable read-only archive document.

Graphing

Communicate results effectively by creating scalable color graphics for network diagrams, rainfall curves, flow hydrographs, volume, outlet, and channel rating curves, interconnected pond results, and more. Even compare contributing structures and composite curves all on the same graph.

The graph manager provides a tree view of all available graphs for quick and easy access. 

PondPack's powerful graphing suite also provides automatic variable interpolation tools to solve for intermediate x or y data points at any specified point on a curve. You can export all graphics  to a DXF file for import into AutoCAD, Microstation, or other drafting programs.