iCIEM is an integrated infrastructure spread over different locations along the Barcelona coastline supporting research and engineering activities in the maritime field (coastal, port and environmental applications). It comprises laboratories of various scales, field monitoring stations, and advanced numerical modelling platforms. iCIEM is managed by the Laboratory of Maritime Engineering (LIM).
Main features
The main facilities are the CIEM large-scale wave flume and the CIEMito small-scale flume, both of which are capable of generating waves and currents. CIEM, a large-scale 2D test flume with minimal distortion (100 m long, 3 m wide and up to 7 m deep), is a valuable tool for conducting experiments for coastal, port and oceanographic engineering, in addition to other fields such as aquaculture and the use of marine energy resources. CIEMito is an 18 m-long transparent flume with a useful cross-section of approximately 0.40 m wide and 0.56 m high. It supports small-scale experiments and optimises and complements the CIEM for optical measurements of transparent water in particular.
The Maritime Field Observation Laboratory includes the XIOM Shelf Observatory for the collection of meteorological and oceanographic variables along the entire coast of Catalonia, from the Gulf of Roses to the Ebro Delta, with the capacity to measure waves, currents, meteorology, long-period oscillations (tide and other long waves) and a group of maritime-terrestrial meteorological stations that have been specially adapted for the coastal area.
The Pont del Petroli Coastal Observatory is a research pier extending 250 m offshore from very shallow waters to intermediate depths (12 m). As the first facility in microtidal conditions in the European Union, it complements the network of research piers that includes HORS in Japan and Duck in the USA. Both laboratories are supported by a high-resolution Numerical Modelling Laboratory, which provides a range of services from hydraulic model replication to meteo-oceanographic parameter prediction systems, and a Remote Laboratory (rWLaB), an educational, research and knowledge dissemination platform that provides remote access to the laboratory facilities and various field data collection stations (XIOM and Pont del Petroli).
