Very large flume

The system consists of a rectangular steel channel, with base and lateral walls of 15mm thick transparent glass material, connected and sealed internally with watertight silicone rubber also able to prevent thermal dilatation. The base has a surface of 15m by 4m and the depth of the channel is 0.4m. To create a current inside the channel, a closed hydraulic circuit was constructed. The water is supplied by a large metallic tank with a Flygt centrifugal electro-pump downstream which sucked the water into a 200mm diameter steel pipe and then discharged the same water into the upstream steel tank. A side-channel spillway with adjustable height made from different plates mounted together is fitted into the upstream tank. The water that overflowed is directed into a pipe with a 250mm diameter similar to that used for the water supply and parallel to it, and is finally discharged into the tank downstream of the channel. Two different electromagnetic flowmeters are mounted onto the two parallel pipes described above in order to measure the flow rate in the channel as the difference between the two discharge measurements. The upstream and downstream gates can be used to control the channel flow.