The University of Southampton is developing a new hydrodynamic facility at the recently opened Southampton Boldrewood Innovation Campus.  The aim of this facility is to provide a world class fluids facility supporting research, teaching and enterprise across the aerospace, energy, maritime and transportation sectors.  This capability will complement the simulation expertise using high performance computing.
Construction of the building is nearly complete and its progress since June 2014 has been captured in a time-lapse below (please click the image).

 
The new wave/towing tank within the new building is 138m long, 6m wide and 3.5m deep with the capability of producing a full range of unidirectional waves up to 0.9m height.  The carriage will have a maximum speed of up to 12 m/s.  Our vision is that the laboratory will have a modular philosophy and  instrumentation systems focussed on advanced fluid flow diagnostics ideal for many exciting future research studies.  It will be accessible through schools/community outreach and Open days as well as provide an essential experiential component of our ship science undergraduate and maritime engineering postgraduate teaching programmes.
We will provide a series of reports over the next few months as we move into the exciting final fit out and commissioning phase.