'Over the last few years we have seen a real resurgence in the demand for physical modelling, said HR Wallingford director, Keith Powell. 'To meet these needs HR Wallingford has invested over £4m in the construction of a new physical modelling laboratory and the development of state of the art modelling facilities.'

Increased demand has been partly fuelled by activity in the port construction sector and partly by an increasing need for designers to fully understand the potential response and performance of maritime and fluvial structures under hydraulic loadings. At the same time coastal and maritime developments are growing in scale, and structures are being pushed into deeper and deeper water.

The Froude Modelling Hall covers an area of more than 11,000m 2and houses facilities that include wave and flow flumes and basins equipped with the latest instrumentation including multi-element wave paddles, bi-directional current generation systems and very accurate force and load measurement systems. The largest basin in the facility, at 75m by 32m, is one of the largest unobstructed hydraulic test tanks in the world.

The size of the basins allows the largest of structures to be tested without risk of incurring significant scale effects. This, together with the sophisticated instrumentation, ensures that designers, contractors and owners alike can be fully confident in the performance of the structures and schemes tested and can hence avoid the risks of under-design and the often excessive costs of over-design.

The Froude Modelling Hall extends to approximately 11,200m 2, and replaces the well known Reynolds Building that served engineers in the UK and around the world for the last 60 years.

The facility is home to a wide range of state of the art facilities including:

. Wave flumes, equipped with wave absorbing paddles to minimise wave reflections within the flumes.

. Wave basins, including both separate and linked units with the latter being capable of extension to 2,400m 2of model area. The wave basins can be equipped with either long crested or multi-element short crested wave paddles depending on the requirements of the study.

. Wave-current or current-only basins with uni- or bi-directional current discharges of up to 1.2m 3/s. Again, these basins can be equipped with either long crested or multi-element short crested wave paddles depending on the requirements of the study.

. A general purpose flow flume with volumetric measurement capability.

. A dedicated area for hydraulic structure and river floodplain models equipped with high volume sumps and storage tanks.

. Specialist test rigs for air in pipelines, grease separation and aircraft ditching studies.