Posted on April 29, 2026
America’s locks and dams are on borrowed time, with many operating well beyond their life expectancy. The economic risk of a single failure has forced waterway managers to rely on long-standing technologies and designs, rather than adopting more modern, innovative components.
To help reduce the risk and provide assurance to those managing and operating these structures, the U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center is designing a first-of-its-kind model to test, validate and accelerate the deployment of new infrastructure designs and critical components.
The Hydraulic Structures Experiment and Validation Model, slated to come online in fiscal year 28, will be located at ERDC in Vicksburg, Mississippi, and allow engineers the ability to evaluate new designs at or near-scale.
During a recent episode of the Power of ERDC podcast, Dr. Charlie Burchfield, Technical Director for Water Resources Infrastructure with the Geotechnical and Structural Laboratory, said the goal is to provide engineers and infrastructure operators across the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) the near certainty they need to move forward with new designs and upgrades.
“When you look at that impact, you have to have the confidence, you have to reduce the level of risk and improve things to the point that you know when you put something in place that it’s going to be there,” Burchfield said.
He noted that while researchers are eager to push the boundaries of technology, those operating the locks require a guarantee that only physical validation can provide.
“They don’t want to fail at all,” he said. “Any failure is of concern.”
The solution is a model of unprecedented scale.
Bowen Woodson, a research civil engineer at the forefront of working on the model’s design, described the capability as a testing space roughly the length of a football field, measuring 30 feet wide and 20 feet tall. The modular model will allow realistic, dynamic loading conditions that current computational or small-scale models simply cannot replicate.
“It allows us to test these with realistic loading conditions so we can flow water through it, or we can have hydrostatic head where we have one water level on one side and then another water level on the other side,” Woodson said.
The design process for the model involves partners in industry, as well as USACE’s Inland Navigation Design Center.
“[This model] gives us a capability to demonstrate these technologies and to test and validate these technologies,” Burchfield said. “That’s never been done before, ever.”
The model, when completed, will be highly adaptable, giving it the capability to accept and evaluate various custom designs, ranging from modular miter gates to critical components created through large-scale additive manufacturing.
This capability fundamentally will transform how USACE approaches research and development.
As the model begins to test new designs, concepts and materials, data generated will support more robust numerical models, which themselves will help accelerate refurbishments and the transfer of innovative designs.
By providing tests and data on items that practitioners can see, touch and feel, the model will effectively remove a roadblock to infrastructure modernization.
“It’s fielding solutions,” Woodson said. “That’s what we want to do here. It’s actually putting infrastructure out there … and then us being that last point to check and to validate everything before we push it out.”
To download and listen to the Power of ERDC podcast featuring Burchfield and Woodson discussing the model and its potential, visit https://poweroferdcpodcast.org/55-testing-future-infrastructure/.
