Users Guide to Physical Modelling and Experimentation: Experience of the HYDRALAB Network

A Users Guide to Hydraulic Modelling and Experimentation provides a systematic, comprehensive summary of the lessons learnt in HYDRALAB III. It offers recommendations for the best practice to be adopted when carrying out state-of-the-art, modern laboratory investigations and an inventory and it gives a review of the recent advances in instrumentation and equipment that drive present and new developments in the subject. The Guide concentrates on four core areas ' waves, breakwaters, sediments and the relatively-new (but rapidly-developing) cross-disciplinary area of hydrodynamics/ecology. The experiences gained in the CoMIBBS component of HYDRALAB III provide the material for the chapter on composite modelling guidance, principles and practice. Much of the detailed consideration of scaling and the degree of relevance of laboratory/physical modelling approaches is given for specific contexts in the individual chapters. The Guide includes outputs from the many transnational access projects that have been supported within HYDRALAB III, as well as the focussed joint research activities SANDS and CoMIBBS. Its primary purpose is to serve as a shared resource containing the outstanding advances achieved within HYDRALAB III but, even more than this, it incorporates the human and institutional collaborations that led to and sustained the research advances, the human relationships that were strengthened and initiated through joint participation in the Programme and the training opportunities that participation provided to the many young researchers engaged on the projects.