Oregon State’s Wave Research Lab

Following extensive testing against competing instrumentation, the OH Hinsdale Wave Research Laboratory (WRL) at Oregon State University (Corvallis, OR) placed an order for 12 Nortek Vectrinos. The Vectrinos will be used for a variety of experiments in both their tsunami modeling basin as well as in their wave tank.

The Vectrino is the new generation acoustic Doppler velocimeter. All the electronics is now housed in a single canister attached to the sensor probe, and data are communicated over a serial line to any PC / data logger. The maximum sampling frequency is increased from 25 to 200 Hz, and high speed sub millimeter accuracy bottom topography measurements can be made in parallel with the 3D velocity measurements.

The CROSSTEX Project (NSF Award# 0351741), in which the WRL will serve as a focal point, will incorporate the Vectrinos. This project will focus on the physical mechanisms of nearshore hydrodynamics and sediment transport in the surf zone and in particular the relative importance of wave breaking turbulence and bottom boundary layer turbulence on nearshore sediment suspension processes. The ability of the Vectrino to minimize data loss in turbulent environments as well as the form-factor and 200 Hz sampling rates were critical to its incorporation in this experiment.

For CROSSTEX, the Vectrinos will all be connected to a single data acquisition system. The sensors will be synchronized to begin and end sampling through a common sync pulse. The result will be data sets from all 12 instruments that not only collected data over the same period of time but also contain identical numbers of samples.