Hydraulics Lab

90,000 litres of water. Almost 4 metres long. Flow speeds of 6 metres per second. Our biggest water channel doesn’t do things by halves. One of its many uses has been to model flow over the Royal Navy’s largest ever ship class, the Queen Elizabeth Class aircraft carriers. The data, integrated into a flight simulator, allows pilots to safely practice landing on the ship in the highly unsteady wind conditions.

Elsewhere we have two flumes capable of recirculating water with suspended sediment, one of which is also equipped with a wavemaker. The lab also contains a 1 metre wide wave tank and a GeoTank facility. This equipment is used for projects ranging from evaluating nature-based solutions for flood mitigation and coastal defence to the environmental impacts of offshore energy projects. We are also able to characterise the dynamics and changes in particle flow using laser bed scanning, Acoustic Doppler Velocimetry, and Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV) systems. This includes state of the art Dantec Dynamics equipment capable of two-dimension three component PIV, laser-induced fluorescence, and volumetric velocimetry techniques.