Visualizing Flow Through the Brandon Road Lock & Dam

This video portrays two areas near the Brandon Road Lock and Dam, a US Army Corps of Engineers facility in Joliet, IL. This video was collected as the lock was emptied through the downstream valves, refilled with water, and then emptied again. This data collection is supporting efforts to combat the spread of invasive Asian carp into the Great Lakes Basin. Brandon Road has been selected as a location to apply controls to stop the movement of these fish. To develop these controls, resource managers need to understand how the water moves through the system. This video shows a split screen with three different panes. The left half shows a series of photographs from two cameras in the lock (left), and downstream of the lock (middle). The right side portrays the velocity vectors at an acoustic Doppler velocity meter located in the channel approximately 1,200 feet downstream of the lock. The arrows on the velocity vectors indicate what direction the water is flowing and the length of the velocity vectors indicate how fast the water is flowing. All photos and the velocity vectors are time synchronized so that the viewer may see how the changes in the lock level change the velocity in the downstream channel. This data collection is supporting efforts to combat the spread of invasive Asian carp into the Great Lakes Basin. Brandon Road has been selected as a location to apply controls to stop the movement of these fish. To develop these controls, the hydrodynamics of the system must be well characterized by collecting flow and velocity data.