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Research studies in hydraulic engineering greatly depend on various measurements. Currently available equipment’s for various hydraulic measurements can provide data with high accuracy. However, these are usually very expensive and in most of the cases are intrusive. In addition, different equipment’s are employed to measure different hydraulic parameters. The measuring instruments also need highly controlled environment for conducting experiments. These limitations call for a need of a single instrument which can be used to measure different hydraulic parameters. Additionally, the equipment ideally should be inexpensive, non-intrusive and which can be easily used in simple laboratory settings. Kinect is an input device for the Microsoft Xbox 360 gaming console which consists of an infrared (IR) emitter, an IR sensor and a colour camera. Kinect generates three outputs namely IR image, visible colour image, and depth images. Despite the incorporation of several sensors and features in this device, its price is around Rs15000 which is very inexpensive considering various instruments used currently for hydraulic studies. Kinect has found tremendous applications in robotics, medical sciences, earth sciences, physical fitness industries, business and marketing. For its rapid data collection and ability to generate the moving three dimensional data quickly. In the present study, Kinect is evaluated for various non- intrusive hydraulic measurements. Measurement of water level, water depth, bed elevation; and water velocity by Kinect is explored in detail. It is found that Kinect can measure water level, water depth, water surface velocity and bed level. A procedure to use Kinect to obtain the height of an object under water is presented. Static 3-D objects under water are mapped for the purpose. The procedure is extended to study the breaching of a sand dam due to over-topping. The evolution of the dam profile is obtained by Kinect. The effects of dam height and downstream slope of the dam on evolution of dam profiles are analysed. It is found that for higher dams the erosion is smaller than the dams with lesser height at a particular time from overtopping. Erosion in dam with height 12cm and in dam with 9 cm is 5.6 percent and 8.75 percent higher respectively from dam with height 15cm. It is also found that dams with flatter slopes have lesser degradation rate than the ones with steeper slopes. The peak rate of degradation for slope 1:2.5 reduced by 52.3 percent and by 61.6 percent for slope 1:3 from that of slope 1:2. In addition, Kinect is also successfully used to detect and quantify 3D changes occurring in a partial dam breach. |
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