Highway Drainage Junction Loss

The Federal Highway Administration's (FHWA) Turner-Fairbank Highway Research Center J. Sterling Jones Hydraulics Research Laboratory conducted hundreds of experiments to investigate energy losses at storm sewer junctions as a function of physical configuration and flow. The data collected were then reduced to equations which mathematically describe the losses.

Experimental setup for investigating losses as drainage pipe junctions.

These equations have been coded into FHWA's storm drain program, which is part of HYDRAIN, FHWA's suite of hydrology and hydraulics computer models. Similar experiments have been performed to evaluate the hydraulic performance of various culvert inlet designs.