Hydraulics

Hydraulics is fundamental to all water engineering projects, and a thorough understanding of the principles and practice of hydraulics is key to optimising their design and minimising risk. Adequate attention to the hydraulic operation of a scheme at an early stage in the design delivers significant benefits in terms of avoiding costly mistakes or subsequent rework.

Binnies’ expert team of hydraulics engineers and modellers have wide-ranging experience in the analysis, design and troubleshooting of all types of hydraulic structures, including pumping stations, pipelines, tunnels, intakes and outfalls, spillways, control structures and treatment plant components.

We offer a comprehensive range of analysis and modelling services, including computational fluid dynamics (CFD), 1D and 2D river and coastal modelling, dynamic modelling and transient analysis. We also develop and maintain a suite of our own software applications, both programs and standard spreadsheet tools, available for use throughout the organisation. The hydraulics team has experience in the commissioning and supervision of physical model studies, which are used when the size, cost, complexity or non-standard nature of the prototype structure dictate. We are skilled at integrating these various modelling techniques into the development of coherent hydraulic designs for major schemes. Our recent design of a 6.3-m diameter, wet weather flow storage tunnel system for the City of Toronto involved careful coordination of hydraulic elements including dropshaft and deaeration chamber design, sediment management, transient analysis, and CFD and physical model supervision for key structures. The client’s project manager said, “We are extremely impressed with the hydraulics team; they are incredibly knowledgeable and world class.”

Our rivers and coastal modelling team have extensive experience in areas such as hydrological modelling, flood risk assessment, dambreak analysis, scour protection, river morphology and training works, coastal modelling and tidal power, among many others.

Our highly experienced CFD modelling team was set up in 2002 and has grown to include six engineers using Ansys software with multi-processor high performance computing to solve models. The team has applied CFD to a wide range of water and wastewater applications, including pump sumps, treatment processes, weirs, gates, mixers, reservoirs and pollution incidents. We have particular experience in modelling free surface flow for complex structures such as drop shafts (vortex, baffle and direct drop designs), combined sewer overflow (CSO) interception chambers, reservoir spill weirs, flow distribution structures and inlet works.

Binnies’ hydraulics group has a strong tradition of industry leadership through the publication of technical papers, membership of the British Standards Institute and conference committees, and participation in industry steering groups. Over the years, we have contributed to R&D in a range of specialist areas, such as air management and sediment transport in conduits. The team is responsible for a range of technical training courses, presented both internally and externally.

The group has a long and distinguished history of supporting the design of many major engineering schemes around the world. In addition to carrying out the analysis and modelling that provide the basis for the sizing of structures and conveyance systems, our team has considerable experience in providing practical engineering solutions and guidance to project teams at all stages of a design.