Blog

In March 2014, Feed the Future West / WINNER organized a training for farmers in the Cul-de-Sace plain of Haiti on the use of irrigation canals with floodgates, flow measurement, flow calculation methods, and other irrigation techniques.

It is with great pleasure that Openchannelflow announces that Heyward-Charlotte Incorporated has signed as a full-line representative of Openchannelflow for the Carolinas. Serving the municipal, industrial, and power markets, with both sales and service solutions,…

Openchannelflow manufactures fiberglass Parshall flumes in sizes from 1 inch to 12 feet.  Constructed of premium isophthalic polyester resin, Openchannelflow’s Parshall flumes conform to ASTM D1941-91, ISO 9826:1992, JIS B7553, and the Bureau of Reclamation’s…

Portable weir plates have always been a great way to stretch your research dollars.  The modular design allow you to tailor your flow measurement set-up with the need for costly custom construction.  Building upon what was already a successful product, we've…

Putting a flume in really isn't that hard.  You can really break down it down into five steps:  Orienting the flume Siting the flume Securing the flume Cribbing the flume Backfilling

Reduced height flumes provide a convenient solution to applications where the anticipated flows at a site do not warrant a large flume, but where the flow channel is wider than can otherwise easily / economically accommodate a smaller flume.  Commonly found in water rights…

Unless you use or put in flumes for a living, you may not be familiar with the layout of a typical flume installation.   The components of most flume installations are:  the flume (naturally), the sensor, and the flow meter.

The traditional method of measuring wastewater flows is through the use of a flume and an ultrasonic flow meter in a flow manhole (concrete vault / manhole or fiberglass packaged metering manhole).  The combination is reliable and usually requires low maintenance.

We've collected a series of photos exclusively showing fiberglass Parshall flumes in a variety of different sizes.  We're visual people and prefer pictures over words.   We hope you do to!

When investigating a flume’s operation, one thing to look for is the presence of submergence.  Certain visual clues can help an operator to make informed assumptions regarding a flume’s performance. Remember that submergence doesn’t only occur at higher…

The old adage of taking  measuring twice and cutting once has never been so appropriate as it is when determining the depth of a fiberglass manhole.  Although fiberglass (FRP) manholes posses a wealth of benefits; modularity is not one of them.  Because all of the…

Sometimes we come across an installation in the field were we want to show you have others have solved problems that you may be wrestling with.  On a recent site visit, a customer showed us a discharge chute that they had developed to minimize erosion downstream of their…

Openchannelflow is please to announce the addition of a new section to the web site:  Palmer-Bowlus Flumes!   The section wil be full of the same high quality research and information on Palmer-Bowlus flumes that you have come to expect from our other flume products,…

In our recent series …Ways to Screw Up a Flume Installation we highlighted some of the more common (or comical) ways we have seen flume installations go awry.  Now we’d like to show you some of the ones that were done right.

When we wrote our article on Ways to Screw Up a Flume Installation, and its companion piece More Ways to Screw Up a Flume Installation, we touched on some of the basic ways that an installation can go awry.  Those lists, like the one following, were not intended to cover…

When we wrote our article on Ways to Screw Up a Flume Installation, we touched on some of the basic ways that an installation can go awry.  Many of the possibilities mentioned came from the installation conditions.  Here we delve into more of the application errors and…

There are any numbers of ways to screw up the installation of a flume.  What follows are just some of the more basic ones... Not centering the flume in the flow stream Not having uniform flow Having supercritical flow and more....

Bubbler flow meters can be an excellent flow meter choice when measuring flows in flumes or weir boxes.  Bubbler flow meters are unaffected by wind, foam, steam, and floating solids and provide a high level of measurement accuracy.  Adapting bubbler meters for use with…

Fiberglass Diversion Manholes are a way of controlling open channel flows in a factory integrated design.  Utilizing the core design of standard Flow Metering Manholes, Diversion Manholes provide corrosion resistance, speed of installation, and ease of use.  Dig It!…

H Flumes are one of the more versatile styles of flume when it comes to customization for site conditions.  Versatility with the approach section length / layout mean that a wide variety of inlet conditions can be accomodated.  On the outlet side...