Three dams under the same roof! That’s what the Laboratory of Applied Hydrodynamics and Hydraulic Constructions has achieved: it has created scale models of dams located in Madagascar, France and Mali. What for? To study sanding up problems, increase the capacity of a spillway and propose a way to optimally manage the gates. Mission accomplished in all three cases.

The specificity of the Laboratory of Applied Hydrodynamics and Hydraulic Constructions, which is headed by Professor Michel Pirotton and includes some twenty members of staff, is to offer a digital activity (development of software programs that all bear the code name Wolf) and an experimental activity. Two very different but complementary activities. There are very few laboratories of this type in Europe that are able to offer these two possibilities. “The reason we have continued to perform studies on scale models,” explains Professor Pirotton, “is because it isn’t possible to solve every problem using digital modelling despite the progress made in this domain. Furthermore, when we begin studying large structures, the customer likes to know what’s happening on the scale model, to sense how the structure behaves. Our expertise means saying: this can be solved digitally, and this must be done on an experimental basis. We’re practically the only ones able to offer these two possibilities in Europe.”

The work of Sébastien Erpicum, the manager of the Laboratory of Hydraulic Constructions, and his team of technicians, begins when the decision has been made to create a scale model. It is necessary to define what will actually be built, at what scale and how to construct the model. Even though the laboratory works for customers from research departments, it remains entirely a university laboratory. Student and researchers benefit from the trials performed here. They contribute to the development of software programs that are at the basis of digital models. The laboratory also carries out tests for internal doctoral research such as studies on dam failure or two-phase flows. Finally, this allows students, during their end-of-study work, to design a digital model and then test it on a scale model.