The development and deployment of the AQUILA system
Explanation and how to use the AQUeous Integrated Lander system (AQUILA).
Documents
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Details
Sediment is an important part of a healthy functioning aquatic environment, but too much sediment can cause problems. These problems range from damage to the health of aquatic ecosystems to poor quality water in drinking water protected areas. There’s a need to increase our understanding of the interaction of sediment with combined flows (currents and waves).
About the project
The AQUeous Integrated Lander system (AQUILA) project studied sediment transport in complex marine environments, where there are:
- irregular bedforms
- combined interactions of secondary currents
- diverse seabed sediments
The AQUILA monitoring system was developed to study the movement of sediment in the bottom boundary layer of marine environments. The system can simultaneously measure a range of environmental parameters to allow investigations into the processes influencing sediment re-suspension and transportation.
Conclusions
We developed and field trialled a successful, ‘state of the art’ monitoring system which can be used in most marine environments.
The AQUILA project was completed successfully in 1999 and has:
- improved our knowledge about the interaction of sediment with the combined effects of currents and waves through increased data quality
- increased our understanding of hydrodynamic processes near the seabed
- allowed us to get large quantities of high frequency measurements and study turbulent processes in the benthic boundary layer