Calibration of a drag tilt current velocimeter for an open channel application

Abstract

Water is one of the prime elements responsible for life on earth with two thirds of the earth’s surface covered by it. Managing water resources effectively can promote conservation and make the best use of our limited water resources. Having knowledge about flow information on the river networks can be very beneficial for applications such as hydropower, transportation, irrigation, flood mitigation, water treatment, industrial and domestic needs. The development of simple and inexpensive instrument (<RM500) is to help researchers to produce and measure flows on spatial river at a very low cost. The analytic approximation was derived for giving relationship of the instrument’s tilting behavior on water velocity. Calibration process was held and the data are used to investigate the relationship between the measurement collected from the experiment and the known values. Analyzing the experiment results, it was concluded that the instrument tilting in response to the water velocities but not up to the expected known values. Random and systematic errors arise during calibration processes which contribute to the high uncertainties of the instrument. The documented experiments, procedure and facility used for the calibration are given in this paper. It is shown that the accuracy relationship of this instrument against the analytic approximation identified is 66.45%.