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The waterway axis Rhine/Meuse-Main-Danube crosses Europe transversally from the North Sea at Rotterdam to the Black Sea in Romania. This corridor is one of the longest ones in the Trans-European Transport Network (TEN-T) and crosses both EU countries and non-Member States. In order to increase the transport capacity along this axis, many projects are supported by the Trans-European Transport Network Executive Agency as part of the priority project 18. The increase of the lock capacity of the Meuse River in Belgium to reach class ECMT VIb, allowing the traffic of boats carrying up to 9,000 tonnes, is one of these projects. The new lock at Ampsin-Neuville will have a 225m x 25m chamber, with a 4.70m head. This lock will be built between an existing 136m x 16m lock and the weir. As the existing lock is equipped with lateral translation gates, these gates recesses constrain significantly the location of the new lock. Therefore, a through-the-head filling system has been preferred to the longitudinal culvert system selected for similar locks on the River Meuse. This paper focuses on the design of the upstream head of this new lock, equipped with short culverts and a dissipation chamber. In order to guide the design of this filling system, a scale model of the lock head has been set-up at the Hydraulics Research Laboratory of Walloon waterways administration. The specific aim of this model was to investigate different configurations of the conduit network and of the dissipation chamber in order to limit the hawser forces encountered by vessels in the lock chamber, through a reduction of waves and free-surface slopes in the lock itself, and a sufficient uniformity in flow distribution at the dissipation chamber outlet. A composite modelling approach has been used in conjunction with this physical model to optimise the design. The key parameter in the design of the dissipation chamber was the placement of energy and momentum dissipation devices. In order to guide this design, and to limit the number of tests in the scale model, 2D numerical simulations of the flow inside the chamber were run in a variety of configurations such as e.g. longitudinal walls, square columns in aligned or staggered layout, round columns in aligned and staggered layouts. The best options were tested in the scale model. Head-losses and velocity distribution at the exit of the dissipation chamber were measured, for different combinations of upstream water level and discharge through the culverts, representative of different stages of the filling process. The measurements were finally compared with the predictions by the numerical models.
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Christiaens, D., Bousmar, D., & Soares Frazao, S. (2013). Design of the loop culvert filling of Ampsin-Neuville Lock, River Meuse. Smart Rivers, Liège (Belgium), Maastricht (Nl). https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/198683