Brief Description

The Water Engineering Laboratory (WEL) is located at the University of Perugia, Italy, and led by Prof. Bruno Brunone & Prof. Silvia Meniconi. WEL was established in June 1997 and has been renovated multiple times over the past years to meet the research and educational purposes. Recently, Uni. of Perugia and HKUST have collaborated to revamp the WEL to conduct research on transient-based defect detection applications.

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The system consists of a 500 m long, 100 mm diameter HDPE pipe, which can be configured into single, looped, or branched systems with adjustable base demand. However, one major difference from the HKUST lab is a 100 m long pipe laid in a pit that can be filled with different bedding and backfill material to simulate buried pipe effects. A parallel, steel pipe laid alongside the HDPE pipe permits testing of different pipe surrounding materials. The system has 13 bends varying from 35 to 180 degrees. Flow comes from a pressurized tank (up to 16 bar) and five pumps, allowing flow rates up to Reynolds number of 2.5×10^(5) and Mach number of 6.25×10^(-3). The facility is adaptable to provide a controlled testing environment to validate TR theories. The facility is adaptable to provide a controlled testing environment to validate time-reversal theories.

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