Flow measurement monitoring technology in water engineering

Significant progress in flow measurement science, flow monitoring and flow survey technologies has been made over the past 20 years due to emergent flow sensor technologies, high-speed acquisition electronics and digital signal processing methods. These flow diagnostic tools are implemented in embedded systems with increasingly powerful, miniaturized, low-power and low-cost micro-processors, offering enhanced measurement performances for experimental laboratory and field experiments.

Many practical hydraulic and fluid engineering problems are facing unsolved scientific bottlenecks such as turbulence controlled transport, mixing or gas transfer processes for which Computational Fluid Dynamics fail to provide reliable simulations and solutions. For such complex flow cases, advanced experimental flow modelling remain essential and the use of sets of complementary flow measurements technologies become crucial.

This course aims to explain basic physical principles of flow measurement science, and advanced measurement methods, tools and instrumentation for water and hydraulic engineering, environmental and industrial fluid mechanics.

Flow measurement technologies applied to laboratory (for process oriented studies) and in natural river or oceanic flows (for both process or flow monitoring purposes) will be described in terms of principle, capability, performance (resolution, accuracy, uncertainty) and limitations. The course consists of a first introduction chapter covering the context, historical path, societal needs and objectives of flow measurement and monitoring technologies. Chapter 2 is devoted the required theoretical notions in fluid mechanics, hydraulics, turbulence, boundary layer flows, signal theory and signal processing. Chapter 3 presents flow measurement principle and monitoring systems used for flow current, flow velocity, flow discharge, SPM (Suspended Particle Matter) and sediment transport rate. Chapter 4 is a practical flow case study of an Open-channel flow case divided into 4 separate modules:

• Module FMT1: Fluvial Hydraulics Module
• Module FMT2: Flow Simulation Module (under available CFD code),
• Module FMT3: Laboratory Experiment Module (at EPFL hydraulic platform Pl-LCH)
• Module FMT4: Data Processing Module (Matlab or Python code).

An oral presentation by each group (2 to 5 students) of the obtained results will be evaluated at the end of the flow case study. This part will count for 50% of final mark. A theoretical exam (1H30) will take place at the end of the semester, counting for the remaining 50% of the final mark.