Bifurcations - Hydralab+
April 4th, 2018
Two days ago I travelled to the UK to do experiments at HR Wallingford for two weeks. We are working with a group in the Fast Flow Facility on a Hydralab+ project on bifurcation stability. Not really my expertise, but if you have been reading my other blog post, you know that I have quite some experience conducting experiments. The project runs for about two months and new researchers arrive and leave every week to help out. The constant factor in our project is Kaspar Sonnemans, a master student from Utrecht University. At the moment I am here with him and Michele Pittaluga from the University of Genoa. Progress since the start of the project has been very slow, however still exciting! The lab is great and the flumes here are huge. Our flume is 4 by 70!m. As a reference, you can easily put three Metronome flumes inside! The past few days we have been busy with installing equipment and straightening the bed for the first experiment. We also created a disturbance in one of the channels and added more sand at the beginning of the flume (four bigbags!). At the end of the day we were all very tired but glad that we got a lot done that day. Today we have been filling the flume with water and the people from HR Wallingford are now calibrating the laser scanners. This will take most of the day. Optimistically, we can run our first experiment tomorrow.
Keep an eye out for my next post on Friday, when I can hopefully show some pictures or videos from the first experiment(s). Then I will also further explain what we are trying to study with these experiments.