ICAR01 - Hydraulics - Laboratory
The Laboratory of Hydraulics of DICAM consists of a spacious ground-floor room of about 2000 m2, located in the building that was office of the Institute of Hydraulics, and of two outdoor fenced areas. The room is dedicated to Prof. Ettore Scimemi, a renowned Sicilian who was Professor of Hydraulics at the University of Padua (Italy).The room water supply is by a recirculation system, by a perimetric pipe supplied by three tanks located at 11, 17 and 25 m above the floor. A further autonomous system uses fresh water taken directly from the town network and supplies a calibration table for water meters. The room is equipped with a concrete flume having a length of about 26 m and a cross-section of about 77x60 cm2, in which flow rates up to 400 dm3 s-1 can flow. In the two outdoor areas there are an iron tilting flume 14 m long with a cross-section 60x60 cm2 and a concrete tank 5.5x5.5 m2 used to supply free-surface physical models for scientific researches or on-commission researches. These outdoor facilities are actually on rehabilitation.
A section of the laboratory, located in the two outdoor areas too, concerns Maritime Engineering and includes a large flume, 40 m long with a 21,90 m2 cross-section, equipped with a last-generation wave maker able to produce monochromatic, random and solitaire waves. There is a further concrete tank 1 m deep with a horizontal section 28x20 m2, which however is on rehabilitation too.
Since its foundation, the Laboratory of Hydraulics has been used to carry out experiments on various topics, such as: water-hammer, jet diffusion, Hele-Shaw models, abrupt channel drops, flow-vegetation interaction, sewer pressurization, sediment transport and many others. Now, experiments on open-channel flows with high sediment transport and on novel hydraulic turbines are ongoing.
In the Laboratory of Hydraulics a number of on-commission investigations by physical models were also carried out, which mainly concerned: spillway structures and outlet-works structures of artificial reservoirs, sediment transport in several Sicilian rivers, flow characteristics in specific river stretches, water meter calibration. The laboratory is able to carry out analogous on-commission investigations even on different topics from the above ones.
The equipment of the Laboratory of Hydraulics consists of a vast and various last-generation instrumentation that allows one to take measurements both in laboratory experiments and in field investigations. The instrumentation includes: ultra sonic velocimeters of ADV type, Laser Doppler velocimeter, ultra sonic level gauges, video systems and much other. Such instrumentation, jointly to researchers' expertise and tradition of the Laboratory, allow development of reliable investigations both laboratory and field, even on commission.
List of several instruments bought recently
A test stand for mini and micro water turbines, with a water pumping system which provides 60 l/s of volumetric water flow rate and 10 m of hydraulic head; the acquisition of the experimental data is made of the following measurement devices:
A set of digital pressure gauges - Contact Gauge PM 82;
An ultrasonic flow meter, transit-time, with clamp-on transducers for inner diameter in the range of 50 mm to 2000 mm;
A torque-meter that allow to measure up to 200 Nm and the rotational velocity of the shaft (up to 10000 R.P.M.);
A control panel for the data acquisition that consists of: a programmable logic controller (PLC), 1769-L30ER by Allen Bradley, with a secure digital (SD) card for nonvolatile memory storage, network connections (USB and EtherNet/IP network), two I/O compact modules (for 8 analog signals and for 16 digital signals) and a two channel encoder.
Radar level transmitter Siemens SITRANS Probe LR for continuous monitoring of liquids, to a range of 20 m;
Ultrasonic velocimeters of ADV type by Nortek, with up to 100 Hz sampling frequency
Field ultrasonic velocimeters of ADV type by Sontek, with up to 25 Hz sampling frequency