The Laboratory is utilizing new, low-cost technology for measuring instantaneous water surface elevation profiles in laboratory flumes. The system currently implemented was designed, built and installed on the Kinoshita Flume. The system uses commercial off-the-shelf technology, namely several MiloneTech eTape™ liquid level sensors which rely on changes in resistance to obtain a water elevation. All sensors are hooked up to an Arduino Mega and the water surface elevation profile is continually output to screen via MATLAB.

 

A screenshot with example output is shown below. The instantaneous water surface is shown every 5-10 seconds and an average of the last readings is also plotted for comparison purposes. The instantaneous and historic water elevation at the location of every tape is also plotted.

Example output from MATLAB routine used to output the instantaneous water surface elevation measurements.

Example output from MATLAB routine used to output the instantaneous water surface elevation measurements.