Icaro

1. No work done
2. Dredging completed
3. Work completed on the sewer system
4. System maintenance

The Icaro project was born out of the collaboration between the Institute of Marine Science of the Cnr and Insula spa with the purpose of expanding our knowledge of how canals work in the historic city centre of Venice. Furthermore, a fundamental objective of the project was to define a series of monitoring methodologies that would be suitable for the assessment of water quality in the network of canals. The activity, which began in 2002 and ended in 2004, was divided into three phases.
In phase 1 (February-October 2002), the study was conducted on two canal systems in the historic city centre, “Borgoloco Pompeo Molmenti” and “San Trovaso”.
In phase 2 which followed (November 2002-June 2003) when the work to dredge the canals in the area of San Trovaso had already begun, the activity concentrated on the “Borgoloco Pompeo Molmenti” system, with a significant extension of the area under investigation.
At the end of phase 2, on the basis of the results acquired during the study, a protocol (specifications) was drawn up which described the monitoring methodologies conducive to assessing any possible variations, over a relatively short span of time, of the water quality in the network of canals in the historic city centre (Icaro Project, phases 1 and 2 – results and methodologies, January 2004).
The third and final phase of the project, called 2B (March-July 2004), was conceived with two primary objectives. First, to continue monitoring the “Borgoloco Pompeo Molmenti” system to extend the collection of acquired data and improve our knowledge of how the system works. Second, the purpose of the activity was to apply and validate the monitoring procedures defined in the methodological protocol written at the end of phase 2, in particular with regard to the following issues:

1. Definition of water circulation and fields of currents in the systems of canals under observation;
2.   study of the concentration of suspended particles and evaluation of the effects of water traffic in re-suspending the sediment on the canal beds;
3. monitoring the variation over time of the concentration of nitrogen and phosphorus, and the influence of draining urban waste and of the water regeneration in determining the levels of concentration in a column of water;
4.  validation of a two-dimensional model with finite elements by comparing the simulations with the data acquired experimentally in the “Borgoloco Pompeo Molmenti” system.