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Huddersfield FC – The Galpharm Stadium
Location: Huddersfield, England
Huddersfield’s Galpharm Stadium was one of the first stadiums in the UK to feature a concave curved roof which slopes towards the pitch. Completed in 1995, the venue is home to Huddersfield Town Football Club, Huddersfield Giants Rugby League Club and plays host to a number of major sporting and musical events.
The curve of the roof is aesthetically striking and gives character to the stadium. However, removing rainwater from its forward edge is similar in effect to removing water from the brim of a baseball cap – the water tends to run naturally from the middle sections and move quickly to each side.
The only way for an alternative system to cope with such a design would be to have a large number of outlets along the entire length of guttering, to drain as much water as possible before it builds up at the extremes. Of course, every outlet in an alternative system typically requires it’s own down pipe, and how many discerning sports and music fans want their view to be obscured by a frustrating curtain of rainwater pipes? The obvious solution to this problem would be a reduced number of down pipes, but in a conventional system, with its implicit inefficiency, the bore of the down pipes would need to be greatly increased to cope with the same rainfall parameters, so the spectator’s problem is still apparent. However, the ability of self priming syphonic systems to carry water under negative pressure horizontally means that water draining from outlets can be carried to each end of the curved stand at a high level, out of the eye line of fans.
To ensure that the outlets would be able to cope, Fullflow’s analytical design software Primacalc® allowed an accurate model to be created of the water volume flowing into the gutter along its entire length for given rainfall intensities. This allowed the gutter to be sectionalised using stop ends, effectively creating a series of smaller dams, each with a self-priming outlet at the downstream end capable of draining the specified volume of rain water. These outlets are then connected to a collector pipe which follows the line of the roof into the corner of the stand, the pipes are then routed at high level to the rear of the stand and into downpipes at the back, with no obstruction to spectator’s view or to access and with minimal requirement for expensive and time consuming underground work during the construction process.
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