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Accueil > Grands équipements > Le tunnel hydrodynamique

The hydrodynamic tunnel

The hydrodynamic tunnel of LEGI is a large facility used for investigating various types of liquid flows and more especially cavitating, supercavitating and ventilated high-speed flows.

The tunnel consists of the following main components :
- a driving motor-pump of variable speed with a power of 165 kW and a maximum flowrate of 750 l/s
- two large resorbers that keep the water temperature constant and dissolve the minute air bubbles potentially generated in the test section
- a helical blade-wheel flowmeter and various pressure and temperature sensors
- two parallel test sections of 2.50 m in length that may receive various types of experimental devices
- two large downstream tanks especially designed for an efficient separation of the air injected in the test section in the case of ventilated flows
- a vacuum pump that lowers the pressure below the atmospheric pressure for cavitation tests
- a nuclei seeding system and a cavitation susceptibility meter for controlling and measuring the water quality in terms of nuclei content.

Since it was built in 1967, the hydrodynamic tunnel of LEGI has undergone several major technical developments. The nuclei control system was installed in 1986. The second test section was changed in 2004 in order to test marine turbines and the first test section was changed in 2016.