The SERC Flood Channel Facility

SYNOPSIS The Paper describes a new large central experimental facility which has recently been built to investigate the hydraulic behaviour of rivers and flood alleviation channels when they flow in an out-of-bank condition. The SERC flood channel facility is jointly funded by the Science and Engineering Research Council (SERC) and Hydraulics Research Ltd (HR), on whose premises the facility has been built. A five-year research programme has been identified and will be supported by the SERC together with a contribution from the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (MAFF). The authors outline the need for such a facility in flood channel research, the background to the design, construction and instrumentation of the facility, and give brief details of the initial phase of the research programme, which involves four university research teams. It is hoped that the SERC flood channel facility will be a focus for other experimental researchers and will bring together theoreticians, numerical modellers and experimentalists concerned with river channel hydraulics. At present seven UK universities are involved in the SERC Working Party on Flood Channels, along with representatives from HR, MAFF and consultants.