THE USE OF STRAIN-GAUGES TO MEASURE LOW-VELOCITY FLUID-FLOW

A device was designed, built, calibrated, and installed in a small sha llow lake for the detection and measurement of water movement at low v elocities in natural environments. The device used sets of typical str ain gauges in a full-bridge configuration positioned orthogonally with respect to each other and in an array to receive multiple signals. St andard analog to digital detection and recording, via simple computing techniques, was used. This article also reports the first directly me asured slow flow directionality of shallow water movement in the three coordinate system and its conversion to cylindrical and spherical sys tems. (C) 1996 American Institute of Physics.