Articles

CE Club May 2018 Update

Water Resources Engineering with Kimley-Horn

Ashlyn Morgan of Kimley-Horn spoke to the Hillcrest High School CE Club about water and wastewater utilities. She discussed rehabilitation projects she is currently working on in Dallas, including trenchless rehab methods. She also shared some brand-new projects she’s been working on, including a new pump station in western Flower Mound.

Ashlyn also led a great group activity on water master planning. The classroom was split up into teams and each group was given three regions of a town with specified water demands. The students had to pick pumps and pipe sizes so that water could efficiently get to all three regions. Each pump and pipe type also had an associate cost along with its capacity. This helped teach the students about optimization and challenged them to find the most economical solution.

MEP Engineering with Stantec

Priscilla Maya, a mechanical engineer at Stantec, gave the Woodrow Wilson CE Club students a presentation on MEP systems within the built environment. She showed them illustrations of how heating, ventilation, and air conditioning systems are set up in buildings just like the school they walk into every day. She even pointed out the different elements of the heating and air conditioning system in Mr. Carver's classroom such as the thermostat and ceiling diffusers. The students were also shown how to calculate the "load" in a building from the perspective of an MEP engineer. The building skin, interior partitions, occupants, and equipment such as computers and machinery all affect how an interior space must be conditioned and ventilated. The students were asked to consider the "load" in their classroom and how this could affect the design and performance of the school's mechanical systems.  The students were very impressed that some of the terminology and equations used in their class curriculum were used by Priscilla in her daily work as an MEP engineer. This direct connection between the concepts learned in class and the practical application by a "real-life" engineer are a great encouragement and motivation for the students in Mr. Carver's classes.

The students then put these concepts and theories to work, collaborating in teams to design a balloon race car out of foam core board, cardboard, dowels, and plastic straws.  The greatest challenge was to maximize the thrust out of one or multiple straws to make their race car go the farthest. Additional photos can be found online here.

Water Resources with BGE Inc

Heidi Fischer of BGE Inc spoke to the Woodrow Wilson High School CE Club about her career in water resources engineering. She broke down the structure of water resources into three categories:

• Hydrology – how much water we have/get
• Drainage – where does all that water go?
• Hydraulics – how we move and control water through pipes and channels

Heidi explained to the students that she makes floodplain impact studies to help other engineers know how high to build their bridges, help developers determine where they can construct new buildings, and help others develop erosion control methods. She took the students through a day in her life at work, which includes field visits, computer modeling, report writing, client meetings, design calculations, and RFI responses. As a practical example she showed the students some models and pictures fo the Crooks Branch Project she worked on for DART.

Finally, she challenged the students with a “build your own floodplain” activity where students were given a blank hill of clay along with tools and materials to make their own unique

 hillside with varying terrain, topography, and surfact textures. The students then poured water down the hillsides to see how the water flow was impacted. Additional photos can be found online here.