Coastal engineering facilities

The hydraulics laboratory in the School of Civil Engineering houses an extensive range of apparatus for physical modelling of coastal hydrodynamics and sediment transport processes.

These facilities are used for physical modelling of coastal systems in postgraduate, 4th year thesis and collaborative research work. The laboratory employs full-time technical staff whom provide expertise in experiment design and construction. The laboratory also houses the experiments used in the practical component of undergraduate fluids subjects.

Our facilities include:

• Three 20m long wave flumes with new state-of-the-art DHI wavemakes and instrumentation.
   
  • One flume is equipped with a roof and computer-controlled fan for wind-wave generation.
  • Two flumes include an 8 component laser beach profiler for rapid high resolution measurement of beach profile evolution. The principles and performance of this system is summarised in :
  • Atkinson, A. and T. E. Baldock (2016). "A high-resolution sub-aerial and sub-aqueous laser based laboratory beach profile measurement system." Coastal Engineering 107: 28-33
     
• A dam-break flume with computer controlled actuator for large scale swash zone and sediment transport studies
   
• A range of open flow channels for sediment transport and related experiments.