ENVIRONMENTAL ENGINEERING SCIENCE

Volume 23, Number 6, 2006

© Mary Ann Liebert, Inc.

Measuring Hydraulic Conductivity in Pervious Concrete

Felipe Montes* and Liv Haselbach

Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering

University of South Carolina
Columbia, SC 29208

ABSTRACT

A computerized falling head permeameter system was used to measure hydraulic conductivity of pervi-
ous concrete from samples taken from three different field-placed slabs with known porosities. Important
differences between samples were found, and these follow the same trend as differences in porosity. The
relationship between porosity and hydraulic conductivity is suggested as a tool for designing pervious
concrete pavements as a stormwater pollution best management practice. A quantitative relationship be-
tween porosity and hydraulic conductivity was established based on the Carman-Kozeny equation for the
samples tested. Samples with porosities less than 15% presented limited hydraulic conductivity. Impor-
tant considerations on the measurement of hydraulic conductivity of pervious concrete samples are dis-
cussed, and the Ergun equation is used to explore the flow regime inside pervious concrete samples.

Key words: permeameter; water pollution; porosity; porous media flow; porous pavements; hydraulic
conductivity; infiltration; laminar flow

INTRODUCTION (EPA, 1999; Olek et al., 2003; Tennis et al., 2004; Fer-
guson, 2005).

P ERVIOUS CONCRETE is one of the important emerging

technologies for sustainable facilities and infrastruc-
ture. Applications of pervious concrete include residen-
tial alleys, roads, driveways, side walks and pathways,
parking lots, pavement, and edge drains. It is considered
a green building material, easy to install, and can be pro-
duced from readily available materials. Important envi-
ronmental benefits of pervious concrete include the po-
tential reduction of urban heat island effects, recharge of
ground water, reduction of stormwater runoff potential,
and reduction of irrigation water use in urban landscapes
by permitting rainfall water to infiltrate and be stored in
the soil in areas where adjacent vegetation is growing
Pervious concrete has been included in the manual of
technologies suggested by the Environmental Protection
Agency for stormwater runoff management (EPA, 1999),
can be used to earn credits under the United States Green
Building Council’s (USGBC) Leadership in Energy and
Environmental Design (LEED) Green Building Rating
System (U.S. Green Building Council, 2002), it is a ther-
mally insulating material and can be used to reduce
acoustic noise in roads (Olek et al., 2003; Tennis et al.,
2004; Ferguson 2005). It has a great potential as a sus-
tainable material for green building and sustainable in-
frastructure, but the material’s potential cannot be real-
ized without additional scientific information on its

*Corresponding author: Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of South Carolina, 300 Main Street,
Columbia, SC, 29208. Phone: 803-777-8318; Fax: 803-777-0670; E-mail: montesf@engr.sc.edu

960
MEASURING HYDRAULIC CONDUCTIVITY IN CONCRETE
properties and performance. Some steps towards estab-
lishing a sound scientific background have been taken by
Montes et al. (2005) in developing adequate tests to mea-
sure porosity, by Zouaghi et al. (2000) and Olek et al.
(2003) on defining the strength characteristics, and by
Olek et al. (2003) and Neithalath et al. (2005) in char-
acterizing the acoustic properties of the material. Re-
search needs on pervious concrete to support sustain-
ability include detailed information on hydraulic
conductivity, pore structure, and flow through the media
for water and other substances.
This study focuses on the measurement of saturated
hydraulic conductivity in field-placed pervious concrete,
its relationship with porosity, the assumption of laminar
flow inside the material, and the applicability of Darcy’s
Law.
BACKGROUND
Important design parameters used for drainage and
runoff control structures are the hydraulic conductivity
and the storage capacity of the infiltration substrate
(Bohne et al., 1993; Fredlund and Rahardjo, 1993). Hy-
draulic conductivity, some times referred as water per-
meability (Hillel, 1980), is a quantitative measure that
characterizes the flow of water through a porous media.
It is derived from Darcy’s Law of flow through porous
media, and is an important parameter in mathematical
modeling and simulation of runoff, infiltration, surface,
and subsurface flow (Hillel, 1980; Bear, 1988).
The hydraulic conductivity of saturated porous media
is considered to be constant and is a good quantitative
measure to characterize the flow of water when compar-
ing porous media. Under unsaturated conditions hy-
draulic conductivity varies with the water content in the
porous medium, and it is generally considered a function
of the degree of saturation of the media or the matrix suc-
tion (Fredlund and Rahardjo, 1993). Unsaturated hy-
draulic conductivity can be measured in the laboratory or
can be approximated from the saturated hydraulic con-
ductivity, the water saturation, and the matrix suction
curves as proposed by Brooks and Corey (1964), Gard-
ner (1958), and explained in detail in Fredlund and
Rahardjo (1993) and in Hillel (1980). Most of the time
pervious concrete applications would work under unsat-
urated condition, but the most critical performance of
these structures will occur after intense precipitation
events where ponding, small flooding, and saturation
conditions are present. Applications such as curbs or col-
lection basins will be designed by considering a small
flooding head from water flowing from adjacent areas to
the pervious concrete surface. Under these conditions is
961
where pervious concrete is believed to have the greatest
potential for stormwater runoff management.
There are several established methods to measure sat-
urated hydraulic conductivity of porous materials. These
methods are based on Darcy’s Law, and the most com-
mon are the constant head and falling head permeameter
methods (Hillel, 1980; Bear, 1988; ASTM, 2000, 2003).
Important characteristics of the method used to measure
hydraulic conductivity of pervious concrete need to be
considered due to the high permeability of this material
(Lindly and Elsayed, 1998; Olek et al., 2003). Traditional
permeameter setups such as those illustrated in the ASTM
D2434 standards and ASTM D5084-03 are not recom-
mended for materials with saturated hydraulic conduc-
tivity greater than 1  103 cm/s (ASTM, 2000, 2003).
Flow velocity inside the porous media will affect the
flow regime and therefore the hydraulic conductivity
measurements. Hydraulic conductivity measurements are
based on the assumption of laminar flow and under tur-
bulent flow the assumptions on which Darcy’s law is
based are no longer valid (Hillel, 1980; Bear, 1988;
Lindly and Elsayed, 1998). Adequate estimation of sat-
urated hydraulic conductivity in porous materials where
high flow velocities occur requires verification that lam-
inar flow is maintained throughout the measurements. It
is common to assume laminar flow in materials such as
sands and silts but in materials such as pervious concrete
the possibility of turbulent flow can not be discarded.
It is generally accepted that Darcy’s Law is valid as
long as the Reynolds number is below 1 (Hillel, 1980;
Bear, 1988; Lindly and Elsayed, 1998). The Reynolds
number for flow through porous media has been defined
as (Hillel, 1980; Bear, 1988):
qd
Rep   (1)

where Rep is the Reynolds number for the particular fluid-
porous media flow situation, d is the characteristic length
related to the porous media (cm); q is the specific dis-
charge as previously defined (cm s1) and  is the kine-
matic viscosity of the fluid (cm2 s1). The characteristic
length d is generally related to the pore size or the di-
ameter of the particles forming the porous media. It is
usual for field placed pervious concrete to have particle
sizes between 0.6 and 1.5 cm, pore sizes between 0.1 and
1.0 cm, and flow rates between 0.2 to 0.5 cm/s (Tennis
et al., 2004). For water flowing through pervious con-
crete at 20°C the values of the Rep as derived from Equa-
tion (1), would be between 1 and 60, indicating a transi-
tional flow between laminar and turbulent regime.
The Ergun equation model, developed in chemical en-
gineering studies of packed beds where a wide range of
flow conditions are common, may better describe the
ENVIRON ENG SCI, VOL. 23, NO. 6, 2006
962
flow regime inside the pervious concrete (Macdonald et
al., 1979; Bird et al., 2002). The Ergun equation has the
following form,
150 7
f     (2)
Re 4
where f is a dimensionless friction factor,
(H0  HL)w p3
     
Dp
f       (3)
wq 2
L (1  p)
w and w are the specific weight and the density of wa-
ter, p is the porosity of the medium, Re is a modified
Reynolds number (Macdonald et al., 1979; Papathana-
siou et al., 2001),
Dpwq
 
1
Re     (4)
w (1  p)
Dp is the equivalent spherical diameter of the particles of
the particles forming the media and w is the dynamic
viscosity of water. Dp is estimated as:
Dp  Davg   (5)
where Davg is the average diameter of the particles form-
ing the medium and  is the sphericity of the particle,
defined as the ratio between the surface area of a sphere
of diameter D divided by its volume and the surface
area of a nonspherical particle of average diameter Davg
divided by its volume (McCabe et al., 2001). Macdon-
ald et al. (1979) used the Ergun model to predict flow
rates through a variety of packed beds that included mix-
tures of several sized irregular-shaped particles and a
variety of consolidated media. They noted that the Er-
gun model consistently underpredicts the flow in con-
solidated media and attributed their results to the diffi-
culty associated with obtaining an adequate particle size
value for this type of media, where particle gradation
and shape are difficult to estimate and the cementing
material create further distortion of the real particle and
pore sizes.
The Ergun equation is considered as an analysis tool
in this research because little is known about the flow
regime occurring inside pervious concrete materials and
because of the similarity between pervious concrete,
packed beds, and other consolidated materials in which
the Ergun equation has been used to model the flow
(Macdonald et al., 1979). It is also important for pollu-
tant transport models to know when the flow inside per-
vious concrete is laminar or becomes transitional or fully
turbulent. Absorption and adsorption processes may be
very different for the flow conditions mentioned.
Not all the pores participate effectively in retention and
conduction of fluids through pervious concrete; isolated,
dead-end pores, and capillary pores do not participate in
MONTES AND HASELBACH
the water transport. The fraction of pores that participate
in the conduction of fluids is called effective porosity.
Quantitatively, the definition of effective porosity might
vary according to the application for which it is mea-
sured. Domenico and Schwartz (1990) define effective
porosity as the percentage of interconnected pores, while
Bear (1988) discusses how this definition could also ex-
clude dead-end and stagnant pockets as well as smaller
pores in which water movement is greatly reduced by
surface tension. Furthermore, Bear (1988) noticed that an
alternative definition of effective porosity is commonly
linked to the drainable porosity, and precisely this type
of definition was used by Wimberly et al. (2001) in the
description of porous concrete. The high water conduc-
tivity of pervious concrete compared with other materi-
als of similar porosity suggests that most of the pore vol-
ume in this material is actively participating in the
conduction of fluids. Experimental data presented by
Montes et al. (2005), in which pervious concrete samples
were submerged underwater to estimate total porosity
showed how within 30 min most of the water that would
occupy the pores space inside the samples had already
entered, suggesting large size pores and effective poros-
ity being an important part of the total porosity. Due to
the varying definition of effective porosity and the high
percentage of the total porosity in pervious concrete, to-
tal porosity has been chosen as the porosity parameter to
use in this study.
The hydraulic conductivity of a porous medium de-
pends on three basic properties: porosity, medium con-
ductance, and tortuosity (Bear, 1988). Most mathemati-
cal relationships expressing the hydraulic conductivity as
a function of porosity, conductance, and tortuosity are
semiempirical. Such models are complex, and so far have
limited practical use because they require a variety of pa-
rameters that are not commonly available (Vervoort and
Cattle, 2003). Furthermore, pervious concrete is a con-
solidated medium constructed with particles cemented to-
gether, and a representative grain size distribution can-
not be readily obtained. It is understood that porosity
alone cannot define the permeability of pervious con-
crete; however, taking into account that determining tor-
tuosity or conductance is a rather complex task compared
with the determination of porosity, it is expected that
porosity will be a major determinant of the saturated hy-
draulic conductivity of pervious concrete. The Carman-
Kozeny equation (Bear, 1988; Domenico and Schwartz,
1990):
p3

Ks   2
(1  p)  (6)
is a good model to investigate the relationship between
porosity and hydraulic conductivity in field placed per-
MEASURING HYDRAULIC CONDUCTIVITY IN CONCRETE 963

vious concrete. The factor  in Equation (6) is formed
by:
gCo
 
Ms
where g is the gravitational acceleration (cm s2),  is
the kinematic viscosity of water (cm2 s1), Ms is the spe-
cific surface area of the material cm1, and Co is an em-
pirical constant. Given the simplicity of total porosity de-
termination and the availability of data about total
porosity of pervious concrete, it is expected that estab-
lishing a working relationship between pervious concrete
total porosity and saturated hydraulic conductivity will
serve as a preliminary design parameter for hydrologists
and stormwater designers.
The objective of this paper was to measure the hydraulic
conductivity from field-placed pervious concrete, relating
it with total porosity and establishing initial parameters that
will help in the design of pervious concrete systems for
stormwater management and sustainable design.
cut into 30  30 cm sections, was name-tagged, and
transported to the laboratories at the University of South
Carolina Department of Civil and Environmental Engi-
(7) neering. Table 1 shows the main characteristics of each
pervious concrete pour.
Total porosity was measured following the water dis-
placement methodology suggested by Montes et al.
(2005). This methodology estimates the total porosity of
pervious concrete samples by measuring the weight dif-
ference between a dry sample and the submerged weight
of the same sample after 30 min sunken under water and
was determined to be accurate to 3% porosity for simi-
lar size samples (Montes et al., 2005).
Samples from the slab sections obtained from each pour
were drilled to obtain cylinder cores 10 cm (4 in.) in di-
ameter by 10–15 cm (4–6 in.) high. Each cylinder was
tagged and its total porosity measured, and then was coated
with epoxy steel weld (J.B Weld®) around the perimeter.
The drilled and coated core samples from each slab con-
stituted the experimental specimens used to measure hy-
draulic conductivity in the falling head permeameter.

EXPERIMENTAL PROTOCOL Permeameter system

Pervious concrete samples
Samples from three different pervious concrete field
placements in South Carolina were used to determine hy-
draulic conductivity. The first was a 10-cm deep test slab
poured over a sand subbase at Edisto Beach; the second
was poured 15-cm deep over a sand subbase at Spartan-
burg, and the third field pour was made in Charleston
over an impermeable pavement base. Each slab was saw-
A falling head permeameter was constructed in the lab-
oratory to measure hydraulic conductivity (Hillel, 1980;
Bear, 1988; Domenico and Schwartz, 1990). The basic
design of the permeameter consisted of a 10.2 cm (4 in.)
diameter PVC pipe “U”-shape assembly and is shown in
Fig. 1. The “U” shape assembly was mounted over an
Ohaus Scale Base Model B505 with I10 indicator, 50 kg
capacity, 0.01 kg precision, to record head change and
flow data from the permeameter system by measuring the

Table 1. Characteristics of each field pervious concrete pour.

Edisto Beacha Spartanburg Charleston

Date of pour 4/03/03 1/6/04 4/1/04

Cement (kg) — 692 237
Admixture (kg) — 1.7 (MLR) 0.6 (WRDA17)
Water (L) — 174 72b
Aggregate (kg) — 2803 1115
Fly ash (kg) — 0 41
Water/cement ratio — 0.25 0.30
Water/cementitious material ratio — 0.25 0.26
Aggregate/cement ratio — 4.05 4.70
Aggregate/cementitious material ratio — 4.05 4.01
Average porosity (%) 16 18 28
Number of samples taken for saturated 4 7 6
hydraulic conductivity measurements
aLimited information was available from this initial pour.
bWater was added in the field before the pour started to correct water deficiencies observed in the field. This water is not included

here.

ENVIRON ENG SCI, VOL. 23, NO. 6, 2006

964
Figure 1. Falling head permeameter and computer system used to measure hydraulic conductivities. Fv, filling valve; WOB,
water outlet basin.
weight of the system over time. A second scale, Ohaus
Explorer EP220001, 22 kg capacity, 0.1 g precision, was
used to track the infiltration flow coming out of the per-
meameter system over time. At the bottom of the “U”-
shape assembly a control valve [7.6 cm (3.0 in.) ball
PVC valve] controlled the flow from the water column
head to the pervious concrete sample. A 1.3-cm (0.5 in.)
valve and plastic tube were installed in the bottom sec-
tion of the “U” shape in the water column side of the
control valve, in order to fill the system with water. Both
scales were connected to a personal computer through
a multiple serial port. Win Wedge® data acquisition
software from TAL Technologies Inc. was used to trans-
late the signals coming from the scales into Microsoft
Excel spreadsheet data files on which data was recorded
continuously and the experimental procedure was mon-
itored. The system registered the change in mass of the
head column and the total volume flowing out of the
system every second. Hydraulic head changes used in
the determination of the hydraulic conductivity of the
samples are based on the rate of water flow out of the
system.
MONTES AND HASELBACH
Falling head permeameter experiments were conducted
with the initial pressure head starting at 50 cm. Water pres-
sure head was recorded every second after the experiment
started, until water stopped flowing out of the system and
the pressure head was reduced to 0. From each experi-
mental data set, the subset formed by the pressure head
between 20 and 1 cm, and its corresponding time values
was selected for statistical analysis. Data between 20 and
50 cm head corresponded to the initial part of the test, af-
ter the valve in the permeameter had just been opened and
water began to flow. Allowing the first 30 cm of head drop
to flow through the pervious concrete sample let the sys-
tem reach dynamical equilibrium. The last part of the head
drop, between 1 and 0 cm, results in such a low flow that
the sensibility of the scales used to estimate the head
change was not adequate to accurately measure it.
The data set from each experiment was analyzed
using the following equation as suggested by ASTM
(2003), Bear (1988), and Hillel (1980):
aL H1
Ks   Ln  (8)
A(t  t1) Ht
MEASURING HYDRAULIC CONDUCTIVITY IN CONCRETE
where Ks is the saturated hydraulic conductivity, a is the
cross-sectional area of the PVC pipe holding the sample,
A and L are the cross-sectional area and the length of the
pervious concrete sample, t1 is the time at which the wa-
ter head reached the H1 mark at 20 cm, and t is the time
corresponding to each record as the pressure head Ht
dropped from 20 to 1 cm; Ln is the symbol for the nat-
ural logarithmic function.
RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
Flow regime in the hydraulic
conductivity measurements
The Ergun equation model provided an adequate tool
for the analysis of flow conditions inside the pervious
concrete samples. Values of the Ergun equation were cal-
Figure 2. Plot of the Ergun equation and values calculated using the falling head experimental data from samples A5d (p 
16%), B22c (p  22%), and C11b (p  32%) calculated with Dp  0.1, Dp  0.3, and Dp  0.6. (Adapted from Bird et al., 2002.)
965
culated for the data subset of each particular pervious
concrete hydraulic conductivity measurement experi-
ment. It is difficult to estimate the equivalent particle di-
ameter when a consolidated medium is used. The aver-
age diameter size of the aggregate used these pervious
concrete samples is 1 cm (3/8 to 5/8 in.), but the ce-
mentitious material holding the discrete particles together
reduces the porosity and the diameter of the porous chan-
nels. To account for this effect, and for the fact that the
aggregates were not spherical, three different values for
Dp where used: 0.1, 0.3, and 0.6 cm. Those values can
be interpreted as average particle size in the medium with
1 cm and sphericity values of 0.1, 0.3, and 0.6, or parti-
cles with different average diameters and sphericities so
that Dp would be equal to 0.1, 0.3, or 0.6 cm. The results
of the Ergun model calculation presented for the samples
with lowest and highest porosities and saturated hydraulic
ENVIRON ENG SCI, VOL. 23, NO. 6, 2006
966 MONTES AND HASELBACH

conductivities are presented in Fig. 2. The figure shows
that the best fitted data was obtained when Dp  0.1 cm,
a smaller value of what the characteristic particle size for
these material is. It also shows that most of the samples
were in the laminar flow region, but applications with
higher porosity and higher hydraulic head transitional
flow may need to be considered.
Hydraulic conductivity measurements
Saturated hydraulic conductivity Ks was estimated
from the following manipulation of Equation (8):
H1
(t  t1)  Ln  (9)
Ht
by plotting (t  t1) vs. Ln (H1/Ht), fitting a line through
the data set and calculating the slope of the best fitted
line, . The hydraulic conductivity was obtained from 
as:
L
Ks    (10)
A
Table 2 presents the porosity, the estimated hydraulic
conductivity for the falling head permeameter experi-
ments included in the study, and the R2 values for the re-
gression used to estimate the saturated hydraulic con-
ductivity. The repeatability of the measurements was
within 10% of the saturated hydraulic conductivity for
a particular sample.
Samples from the Edisto beach had the lowest poros-
ity range, 16–20%, and a lower hydraulic conductivity,
0.014 to 0.025 cm s1. These samples had hydraulic con-
ductivities below of what is common in the literature
(Tennis et al., 2004). Samples A5a and A5c apparently
had no connecting pore channels through the sample, re-
sulting in no flow through, even with a pressure head
higher than 50 cm. Samples from Spartanburg had porosi-
ties between 16–25% and hydraulic conductivities of
0.132 to 0.404 cm s1. These values are representative
of the expected saturated hydraulic conductivities for per-
vious concrete. Samples from Charleston had the high-
est porosities, 22–32%, and hydraulic conductivities, 0.46
to 1.32 cm s1. The highest conductivity values obtained
from these samples are outside the range of common ex-
pected values for pervious concrete, but were on the
vicinity of the highest laboratory measurements reported
by Tennis et al. (2004).
Relationship between total porosity and saturated
hydraulic conductivity
The Carman-Kozeny equation was used to model the
relationship between porosity and hydraulic conductivity
in the field-placed pervious concrete. Nonlinear regres-
sion was used to fit Equation (6) to the data set obtained
from all the field samples used. Because parameters Co
and Ms are unknown for field-placed pervious concrete,
factor  in Equation (6) was used as a nonlinear fitting
constant. Figure 3 shows the data of porosity and hy-
draulic conductivity for all samples considered in this
study compared with the nonlinear fitted model. Equa-
tion (6) was fitted to the data using the Marquadt method
of the NLIN procedure in the SAS/STAT version 8.2 sta-
tistical software (Draper and Smith, 1998; SAS, 1999).

Table 2. Porosity and hydraulic conductivity of field placed pervious concrete.

Sample number Location p (%) Ks (cm/s) R2*

A5b Edisto 15.8 0.014 0.989

A5d Edisto 16.1 0.025 0.975
B20b Spartanburg 17.7 0.132 0.992
B20c Spartanburg 18.5 0.237 0.981
B20d Spartanburg 15.6 0.180 0.991
B22a Spartanburg 24.4 0.272 0.990
B22b Spartanburg 17.7 0.145 0.992
B22c Spartanburg 22.4 0.154 0.991
B22d Spartanburg 24.9 0.404 0.994
C4a Charleston 25.5 0.457 0.996
C4b Charleston 29.9 0.783 0.994
C4d Charleston 26.8 0.869 0.997
C11a Charleston 29.5 0.941 0984
C11b Charleston 32.0 1.317 0.977
C11d Charleston 30.1 1.190 0.979

*R2 values from the regression analysis used to estimate Ks.

MEASURING HYDRAULIC CONDUCTIVITY IN CONCRETE
Figure 3. Model resulting from the nonlinear fitting of the satrurated hydraulic conductivity and total porosity data to the Car-
man-Kozeny equation.
The model proposed in Equation (6) fitted the data well
with   17.9 2.3, as is observed in Fig. 3. The sum
of squares of the regression model was 96% of the total
sum of squares, residuals are distributed randomly across
the regression line, and the mean of the residuals is not
statistically different from zero, all indicative of adequate
fitting of the data. The final equation for these samples
is therefore:
p3

Ks  18 2
(1  p)  (11)
This nonlinear expression relating total porosity and
hydraulic conductivity is only valid for the samples and
the range of values covered in this research, but may
be used as a guide for stormwater planners and de-
967
signers. Even though all the samples coming from a
particular placement were taken from the same slab,
differences in porosity and hydraulic conductivity
within a slab were important. One sample will not suf-
fice to identify the porosity or the hydraulic conduc-
tivity of a pervious concrete placement. It was ob-
served that field-placed pervious concrete with
porosities below 15% had very limited hydraulic con-
ductivity, and it is assumed that some parts of the per-
vious concrete may not have had connecting channels.
Stormwater pervious concrete designs can be made by
selecting the hydraulic conductivity that best fits the
application and by making sure that the minimum
porosity corresponding to that hydraulic conductivity
is achieved in the field.
ENVIRON ENG SCI, VOL. 23, NO. 6, 2006
968
CONCLUSIONS
The flow regime inside pervious concrete for many
typical applications is laminar, as demonstrated by the
Ergun equation analysis. Therefore, Darcy’s law can be
used to describe the hydraulic conductivity and the in-
trinsic permeability of this material. A relationship be-
tween total porosity and saturated hydraulic conductivity
based on the Carman-Kozeny equation is proposed as a
design tool for pervious concrete stormwater systems. It
was valid for pervious concrete with aggregate around 1
cm (3/8 to 5/8 in.) and porosity ranging from 15 to 32%.
Pervious concrete materials with less than 15% porosity
have limited hydraulic conductivity. Applications with
high porosities and high head may fall outside the lami-
nar range.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We would like to thank Scott Langford of the S.C. De-
partment of Parks, Recreation and Tourism, Chapman
Concrete of Spartanburg, S.C., Gordon Singletary of S
& W Ready Mix, Van-Smith Concrete of Charleston, SC,
and Members of the Carolina Ready Mixed Concrete As-
sociation (CRMCA) for their contributions to this proj-
ect. We are also grateful for the support and funding for
this research made available through the Center for Man-
ufacturing and Technology (CMAT) at the University of
South Carolina. We would also like to recognize students
Robert Freeman and Srinivas Valavala and assistant pro-
fessor Dr. Erik Anderson in the Civil and Environmen-
tal Engineering Department of the University of South
Carolina for their help.
ABBREVIATIONS
a  cross-sectional area of the pipe holding the per-
vious concrete sample (cm2)
A  cross-sectional area of the pervious concrete
sample (cm2)
  Carman-Kozeny equation nonlinear fitting con-
stant
  slope of the regression line used to estimate hy-
draulic consuctivity
Co  empirical constant for the Carman-Kozeny equa-
tion
d  length dimension of the system (cm)
Davg  average diameter of the particles forming the
porous medium (cm)
Dp  equivalent spherical particle diameter in the me-
dia (cm)
MONTES AND HASELBACH
f   dimensionless friction factor used in the Ergun
equation.
g  acceleration of gravity (cm s2)
Ht  water head at different times during the falling
head saturated hydraulic conductivity measure-
ments (cm)
H1  water head corresponding to 20 cm
Ho  initial hydraulic head forcing the flow through
the porous medium (cm)
HL  residual hydraulic head remaining after the flow
has surpassed the medium (cm)
Ks  saturated hydraulic conductivity or coefficient of
permeability (cm s1)
L  pervious concrete sample length through which
the fluid has to flow (cm)
Ms  specific surface area of the material (cm1)
p  porosity expressed as a fraction of total volume
q  specific discharge or flow per unit cross sec-
tional area of the medium (cm s1)
Rep  Reynolds number for a particular fluid-porous
media system
Re  modified Reynolds number used in the Ergun
equation.
R2  square of the multiple correlation coefficient
t  corresponding time of each hydraulic head
record as it dropped from 20 cm to 5 cm in the
falling head permeameter measurements
t1  time at which the water head reached the 20 cm
mark H1
w  density of water (g cm3)
w  dynamic viscosity of water (gm cm1 s1)
w  specific weight of water (g cm3)
  kinematic viscosity of the fluid (cm2 s1)
  sphericity of the particle
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