Creating a Set of New Lab Experiments for a Fluid Mechanics Course in Civil Engineering

Abstract

Many fluid labs were built during a time period where universities had space for large facilities that included flumes, wind tunnels, pump stations, wet wells, etc. Today these labs are out dated and the need for lab space is forcing the closing of large scale labs. This same basic problem exists within the Engineering School at the University of Pittsburgh, thus over the past years we took on the task of removing all the old equipment and replacing it with small bench top scale experiments. This paper will describe the concepts behind the design of the experiments as a result of moving from a few large experiments to a large number of small scale experiments.