River Sections in n4ce Professional
Whilst most general sectioning needs will be met by the inclusion of the features discussed under Section Options, there is one area that deserves special attention, namely River Sections.
One of many requirements of River Sections is that all detail related to a particular section is projected onto a Base Line. This includes Hard Bed, Soft Bed, Left & Right Banks and of course Water Levels. The position of structures, like Bridges, closest to a section should also be included.
Once these Cross-Sections have been determined, another requirement is the positioning of the Long Profile or centreline of the watercourse.
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The starting point is your survey. If it's necessary to recall previous section positions, a feature called Co-ordinates could be used to recall these from previously taken sections. GPS or traditional survey techniques could then be used to establish these base line positions.
It doesn't really matter how the survey is carried out, working from either side of the watercourse using waders or from boats using dipping rods or echo sounding. The software will sort out the data according to codes and order the points automatically.
The key to making this system work is to uniquely code each section with its own string number. As you can see from the adjacent images, various codes can be set up to be identified, including the base line BL. In this example of extracted sections, the string number identifiers are PC1, PC2 etc.
By suitable choice of coding, previous surveys can be compared on the same section. |
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The Section Viewer works with all types of section and in the case of multi-sections, you may step through and view each in turn. Also, note that the colours of each profile can be changed, along with vertical exaggeration, to see how surfaces interact. A running chainage and coordinates is provided as you move your cursor over the profile.
Sections will be saved on the Project Tree as multi-section data folder. |
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Long Sections can be generated from the Cross-Sections, once created. Items to appear in this long section can be selected from a list, as shown opposite.
We appreciate that a contentious issue is the location of the position of the centre line so have given users a choice of Mid LB and RB, Lowest Point or Chainage. This latter option works from a Dimension stored in one of the baseline points.
In all cases the level displayed will be the lowest level in the cross-section.
A quick view of the long section is provided once you have completed your selection of profiles to be displayed and how the centreline is to be calculated.
Tools are available for generating river sections from existing feature strings, but this is not covered here. |
For those of you that wish to explore these sections using a text/spreadsheet we have provided a TRS (typed river section) export option. We have also created our own VBA program that runs in Excel that allows users additional tools including Export options to ISIS and HEC-RAS.
This is more fully discussed elsewhere and is an extra to n4ce. |
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Sections can be plotted either individually or in block, as shown above. The multi-section plotting options previously mentioned in the Sections Options also apply here. All the CAD editing tools are at your disposal, including special functions also previously touched upon. And, if your are creative and prepared to use features of 3rd party software, seriously impressive presentations are possible.
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