Challenge

As a research institution, the Hydraulic Laboratory (WL) is committed to state-of-the-art research tools and infrastructure. For research on coastal safety, navigability of waterways, sediment transport and flooding, scale models are indispensable.

With this project, the WL aims to take steps and make progress toward the development of a new construction technique that allows physical scale models for research to be realized more efficiently, flexibly and sustainably compared to the current technique that is time and cost intensive, allows few modifications and creates a lot of waste.

The idea is that the scale models in the future will be milled out of a material with a low melting temperature (< 40° C), with the milling process being fully automatic so that the scale models can be realized faster, cheaper and more precisely. The low melting temperature of the material allows modifications easily. When the research is finished, the scale model is melted back down. After solidification - preferably within a limited time - a subsequent scale model can be milled out. This minimizes waste disposal.

The innovative challenges lie in finding: a material with the right properties, the development of a fully automatically controlled milling technology, incl. the development of a modular milling robot that can also be mounted on other already existing gantries, and the matching between the two, at the intended scale (40m basin: + 1000 cubic meters of material).