Farm-Scale Water Storage in Morocco: Low-Carbon Design with Parametric FEA Optimization

Abstract

Morocco faces increasing water scarcity with an anticipated decline in rainfall. Rising temperatures have resulted in drier and denser soil, causing water to be trapped on the surface and evaporate. One solution is to shift water management from large-scale to farm-scale. Underground water reservoirs allow the catchment of sparse rainfall events and the resultant overland flows before their evaporation. This research develops a methodology to design such rectangular reinforced concrete water reservoirs using a parametric approach in Python coupled with a Finite-Element Analysis (FEA) software. The aim is to offer both low embodied carbon and affordable designs, for an individual farmer to build. The first method section is used to identify a small region of the design space containing the Pareto front before running FEA on a limited set of geometries in the second section. In the first section, the global shape of the reservoir and the local structural elements are simultaneously designed using analytical expressions of the Eurocodes on multi-dimensional arrays. One key added value of the method lies in the framework developed to handle numerous arrays of different dimensions, while monitoring the indices of each design variables combinations.