Upgrading an Experimental Flume for Engineering Research Education

This grant supports the upgrading of an open channel flume at the University of Arizona. The flume was built in 1980s and has been used by senior faculty conducting intensive experiments on fluvial hydraulics and sediment transport. After a faculty retired in the 1990s, the flume has not been used in the past 10 years. To re-activate the flume, it requires remove the old channel, designbuild a new one, install a digital automatic flow controller, add rails and instrument carts, install a sand feeder, acquire several micro-ADVs and two acoustic velocity profilers, and a laser surface profiler. The upgraded flume will be capable of simulating unsteady flows, sediment transport, and losing streams. The flume has a sufficient length to capture several flood waves. This feature is essential to researches, such as the attenuation and amplification of flood waves, non-equilibrium sediment transport in flood events, evolution of alluvial channel cross sections, processes of bank erosion, sorting of bi-modal sediment under unsteady flow, fluvial impacts of instream hydraulic structures e.g. dikes, bridge piers, abutments, migration of channel platforms, and nutrient dynamics in losing streams.