Experimental study on the hydrodynamic characteristics of a vegetated channel

The aim of this Doctoral thesis is to analyse experimentally, by using measures of instantaneous velocity carried out through a laser Doppler anemometer, the behaviour of streams flowing on a rigid vegetated bottom, realized by means of brass cylinders, and characterized by different height and density. A particular attention has been paid to the effects that such a type of vegetation has both on the flow resistance and on the distributions of the main statistical quantities of the turbulence, such as local mean velocity, and variance, skewness, kurtosis of the fluctuating velocities, and finally longitudinal integral length scales obtained through the autocorrelation function. Measurements are carried out both in boundary layer and in uniform flow currents.