Post date: Nov 16, 2015 3:10:14 PM
This first week of the project, our goal has been to get acclimated with our new surroundings and get a stronger bearing on the finer intricacies of the project that we did not have access to without being on-site. One of the ways we achieved this was by meeting with our local project advisers, Oreste Venier and Gregorio Giorgetti. We headed to a restaurant near the S. Lucia train station to meet up with them, along with Professors Higgins and Carrera.
The meeting ended with large amounts of useful info for updating our methodology. Both Gregorio and Oreste outlined their plans for the term, and how they would go about helping us complete our proposal. Gregorio would help us with creating and modifying boat hulls, while Oreste produced the sensors which would allow us to measure moto ondoso levels and track parcels through the city.
Gregorio explained that we would be working with the 3D modelling software Rhino3D in order to create models of the current and updated boat hulls used by the cargo (mototopo), taxi (motoscafo), Alilaguna, and ACTV (vaporetto) boats. The primary issues with erosion, he explained, was not so much the wake amplitude which created waves on the water, but rather the laminal flow produced by the displacement of large, heavy boats which created pressure differentials at the canal walls, sucking out sediment. Unfortunately, this is difficult to combat as it will always occur no matter the hull, and the primary contributing factor is the weight of the hull. As such, our two primary focuses will be reducing hull weight, and modifying the hulls of taxi boats to produce less wake amplitude, as this will be safer for the surrounding boats.
Our discussion with Oreste had more to do with how we would want the sensors setup. The moto ondoso sensor, he explained, would be ready the week of November 16th, and would be installed at the edge of the grand canal. It would measure water level several hundred times a second, and allow for the computation of a general moto ondoso baseline based on how much that level fluctuates from that day's average (to take into account flooding and other high water level occasions). For the tracking sensors, we asked if they could be configured to use GPS tracking and record position every 10 seconds, with the ability to run and store data for a week without recharging or emptying its memory.