CVEN 5423: Water Resources Engineering

Overview

This course provides a quantitative introduction to water resources engineering, where fluid mechanics, statistics, and computer modeling are applied to hydrologic and hydraulic design problems. For more on how water resources engineers help society:

The course is a follow-up to an undergraduate engineering hydrology class, where the emphasis is on applying water resources concepts to solve problems, and understand some of the cutting-edge work that is happening in the field. For graduate students joining the water resources engineering program from other disciplines, the class can also be a great introduction to water resources engineering. The course goals are:

  • Design water resource infrastructure systems, based on a conceptual understanding of fluid mechanics, statistics, the hydrologic cycle and how its processes can be quantified.
  • Apply computational and statistical techniques to quantify the role of uncertainty, and how it affects water resources engineering design.
  • Explain water resources topics to multiple audiences: a technical audience of other engineers, decision makers that make decisions that bear on water resources problems, and stakeholders that are affected by water resources projects.
  • Appreciate the impact that water resources engineering has on everyday life.

Major topics include:

  • Hydraulics
    • Pipe Flow and Pipe Networks
    • Water Distribution Systems and Water Demand
    • Hydraulic Design: of pipes and drainage channels
  • Hydrologic and Hydraulic Modeling
    • Simple Python programs of some phenomena
    • HEC-RAS
  • Statistics
    • Flood Frequency Analysis
    • Risk Analysis
  • Hydrology and Runoff
    • Stormwater Management
    • Design of retention ponds
  • Water Resources Planning
    • RiverWare
    • Basic water economics
    • Sizing of reservoirs

Course Offering and Eligibility

The course has been offered in the Fall semester at ²ÊÃñ±¦µä since Fall 2013. In AY 2020-2021, will be the instructor for the course. Dr. Raseman is a water resources engineer at Hazen and Sawyer, and an alumnus of our research group!

This graduate course is open to CVEN and EVEN graduate students, as well as students from other relevant majors at ²ÊÃñ±¦µä. There was historically an undergraduate (4000-level) section of this class, but currently the class is only offered at the graduate level. However, qualified undergraduate students are able to take the class with instructor approval.

There are no formal prerequisites for this course. Some knowledge of hydrology is helpful, but relevant concepts will be reviewed in this course.  It is also helpful to have a background in statistics, as well as computer programming with Matlab, R, or python.  There are no formal course prerequisites required, though undergraduate fluid mechanics is recommended.

Syllabus

A sample syllabus from Fall 2019 is available; future syllabi are subject to change.