HIDROMOD Modelação em Engenharia, Lda.

•  Mar 2010 
  Bentley Partner View website
•  Jan 2010 
  IST Spin-off View website

Hidromod, Modelação em Engenharia, Lda, (HIDROMOD) is a Portuguese technical consulting company which develops and applies technical software for environment and engineering purposes.

HIDROMOD was created in 1992 as a spin-off of the University group where its associates completed their PhD degrees. Since the beginning, the main objective of the company was to promote the relations between the University and the Industry by taking advantage of the know-how produced in the University. This link to the Investigation group, together with the high technical skills of its collaborators, gave it the possibility to maintain until today a high technological level, most of the time using tools (models, graphical packages, databases, gis, etc) developed within the group.

This aspect is one of the most distinguished features of the company, once the deep knowledge of the tools that are used guarantees, for one side that they are not used as a black boxes and, for another side, that any particularity of a given problem is rapidly solved by introducing the required additional skills in the tools.
The capability to maintain the necessary continuous updating of the company’s know-how is assured by:
- Integration of people with experience and deep knowledge of the tools;
- Transference of the products developed in the University;
- Participation in R&D projects to maintain a share of development inside the company.

Its main areas of competence, supported by the participation in more than 200 engineering and scientific projects, are related with development and application of mathematical models in areas such hydrodynamics, wave propagation, water quality, sediment transport, catchments integrated modelling, point source and diffuse pollution, etc, but also with the development of open source Gis, Web Gis and databases fitted to the user needs. The company also maintains a deep interest in several research areas and is / has been involved in different R&D projects, both European and nationally funded, as a way to maintain high standards of technological competence. The maintenance of high scientific standards is also supported on a close cooperation with the Technical University of Lisbon (Instituto Superior Técnico).

Having in mind that today knowledge represents the main competitive factor for success, Hidromod always promoted the integration of high qualified technicians in the company. Although the company is maintained small, presently the company employs four people having a PhD degree.

The available tools and skills enables Hidromod to offer a set of services that are proved to be indispensable to help the system managers support their decisions based on objective criteria, contributing to optimize solutions and reduce costs. The main areas where Hidromod has wide experience, based in the participation on a large number of projects, are:
- Hydrodynamic modeling of rivers, estuaries, coastal zones and deep ocean;
- Wave propagation in coastal zones and ports;
- Sediment transport and morphological changes in rivers, estuaries and costal zones promoted by waves, currents and combined action of waves and currents;
- Integrated approaches of the water cycle, from the run-off to the ocean including the catchments modeling, diffuse loads computation and transport and quality processes in rivers, reservoirs and estuaries;
- Evaluation of dredging impacts and maintenance conditions of dredged channels;
- Oil-spills, and other pollutants, modeling, risk evaluation and associated emergency plans;
- Wastewater management;
- Monitoring programs design, coordination and evaluation.

Among the available tools it must be pointed, by its relevance, MOHID modeling system (see details in www.mohid.com) which has different modules to compute hydrodynamics (including the possibility to use different options for both the horizontal grid and the vertical grid), water quality (including formulations similar to WASP, CE-QUAL and ERSEM models), dispersion phenomena (including both lagrangian and eulerian approaches), sediment transport (including suspended sediment transport and sand transport formulations) and wave propagation (boussinesq model). MOHID has also packages for pre and post-processing including GIS capabilities.

Beyond MOHID, other tools are also available such as wave propagation models, coastal erosion models, catchments models, dam break risk and flooding computation models, databases and gis tools (both local or web based systems), etc.