Civil engineering doctoral students Sreerama Kasi Somayajula and Yaping Chi, and G. Padmanabhan, professor of civil engineering, had their paper, “Teaching flownet concepts to engineering undergraduates using electrical analogy of groundwater flow” accepted for presentation and publication in the Proceedings of the 118th American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference and Exhibition scheduled for June 26-29 in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

The paper discusses a simple experimental setup to obtain flownets of selected groundwater problems with different boundary conditions using electrically analogous flow situations. Students are asked to study and understand the selected physical groundwater problems first. Next, they are asked to conceive the corresponding electrically analogous problem for solving which they could use the experimental setup. In addition, students study and understand the mathematical formulation of differential and difference equations of the problem.

Padmanabhan is a longstanding member of the American Society for Engineering Education. The organization has a worldwide membership of approximately 13,990 committed to furthering education in engineering and engineering technology and promotes excellence in instruction, research, public service and practice.