Simple flume for flow measurement in sloping open channel

Abstract

First, this paper presents a new flume for measuring flow discharge in sloping channels, originally proposed by Samani and Magallanez, for use in a horizontal channel. The flume is obtained inserting two semicylinders in a rectangular cross section. Then, using dimensional analysis and the self-similarity theory, the stage-discharge relationship of the flume is theoretically deduced. For determining the two coefficients of the power stage-discharge equation some experimental runs are carried out using flumes characterized by different values of the contraction ratio (ranging from 0.17 to 0.81) and of the flume slope (ranging from 0.5 to 3.5%). Finally, for a given range of the contraction ratio, the relationships for estimating the two coefficients of the stage-discharge equation are obtained.