After sharing with my public my funny ideas about an electric-analogical model of the Venice lagoon, I can now proudly show you the first results:

using this tool I could make the first essays. It was kindly published by Israel A. Wagner and programmed by Leonid Kleyman & Evgeny Skarbovsky. I’d like to warmly thank them all for sharing their work on-line.

Hp: (for those who know a bit of the lagoon morphology)

  1. only simple (monoharmonic) sinusoidal potential oscillation at the three “mouths” of the circuit (same frequency for all, of course)
  2. three inlet channels reproduced via resistors
  3. blind (grounded) capacitors are for the reservoir effect offered by the mud flats, tidal shallows and salt marshes
  4. the three sub-domains communicate thanks to dissipative link (small channels), a little resistance
  5. the two “sensors” are placed near the wave generator (tidal boundary condition, in green) and near the main, central capacitor (the in-lagoon measurement, in yellow)

Basic circuit scheme

What we can observe is the typical “water level” (played here by a voltage, or electric potential, as water level is a potential energy) oscillation damped and delayed (yellow signal) by the dissipative propagation across the system of the periodic perturbation.

Basic circuit response

For the curious people: here is the code of my “worksheet matrix“: just click on the applet (file) “save/load” button, copy my code in the new window and operate the menu action->update matrix. Then “play” is all you need to do to see a very intuitive animation of the (electric) dynamics of the lagoon-circuit.

The things that must be done to do a first (and rude) improvement to this (let me say) “model”:

  • input more realistic signals (possibly any kind of time-series)
  • dimensional analysis for a better tuning of the electrical magnitudes needed in order to obtain a satisfying phenomenological reproduction
  • giving more complexity to the system adding more components
  • adapting the components response to get a more hydrodynamic-like (and less linear) behaviour: e.g. some hydraulic dissipations vary with the velocity square…

And finally we’ll have to:

  • get real bathymetric, bed roughness (vegetation …) maps for a hydraulic-electric conductance scheme
  • build (in wires) the model in its final layout, possibly with integrated input-output cards for easy computer integration so as to manage directly signal generation and physic measures recording
  • get real field data to calibrate and validate the machine