Facilities

The Troy Lab is part of the Lyles School of Civil Engineering at Purdue University. Our home laboratory is the Christopher and Susan Burke Hydraulics and Hydrology Laboratory, a 13,000 foot research and teaching laboratory that has numerous flumes and basins for water studies. The Troy Lab uses the facilities listed below. (Please see the Burke Lab description for a full listing of the lab’s research and teaching facilities.)

Strat Flows Facility

Large Stratified Flows Facility

For investigations targeting fluid systems with variable densities (such as the ocean and temperate lakes), the lab has a large-scale stratified flows facility. This Purdue facility is a 0.6m wide, 0.6m tall facility with a 10m test section that was custom fabricated by Armfield, Inc. (UK) for the PI. The facility has glass walls for all of the test section faces, and instrument rails above and below the channel. The facility can be used either as an enclosed tank, as it is for internal wave experiments, or as a re-circulating flume. The pumping capabilities of the flume are nearly 120 liters/sec. The facility is equipped with a set of bottom diffuser ports through which saline fluid can be injected, in order to density-stratify the tank, as well as a selective withdrawal device to allow for repeated experiments with nearly identical stratifications. The facility is housed in a specially-constructed temperature- and light- controlled enclosed room to tightly control the experimental conditions, and de-ionized water is used to fill the facility. To date the facility has been used for experiments on boundary layers, waves, flow around objects, and dispersion.

TOW TANK

Purdue Tow and Wave Basin

Renovated in 2018, this 150ft long facility is an enclosed basin that can be operated either as a tow tank or a wave basin. The facility has a large, instrumented carriage that can be operated at speeds approaching 5m/s. The carriage is instrumented with a 3-D, tomographic particle image velocimetry (PIV) system that resolves flow fields around towed objects. The facility is also able to operate as a wave basin, and is equipped with a HR Wallingford paddle wave generation system for 2-D wave studies, as well as 15 wave gages for measuring waves along the tank.

Instrument Room

Field Instruments Room

This laboratory room is used for preparing field instruments and assembling moorings.