MAE 125B. Fluid-Solid Interactions in Environmental Engineering

Winter 2008

This course provides an introduction to groundwater flow and pollution transport in the subsurface. Specific topics include Darcy flow, fundamentals of flow, diffusion and dispersion, gravity currents and plumes in porous media, fundamentals of adsorption and surface reactions, and chemistry of fluid-solid interactions.

Instructor:

• Prof. Daniel M. Tartakovsky, Office: Room 577 EBU II, E-mail: dmt@ucsd.edu

Lectures:

• 2:00pm-2:50pm, MWF, CENTR 224A

Office Hours:

• 4:00-5:00pm, Wed and by appointment

Academic prerequisites:

• Engineering majors and students receiving a grade of C- or better in MAE 125A

Prerequisites by topic:

• Elementary fluid mechanics,
• Differential and integral calculus,
• Elementary ordinary differential equations,
• Elementary partial differential equations

Textbook:

• Class notes
• A. R. Freeze and J. A. Cherry, Groundwater
• G. Pinder and M. Celia, Subsurface Hydrology

Course grade:

• The final course grade will be based on the homework problem solutions (20%), the mid-term exams (40%), and the final project (40%). You may discuss homework problems, but must prepare homework reports on your own.
• The 1st midterm exam: TBA, CENTR 224A
• The 2nd midterm exam: TBA, CENTR 224A
• The final exam: March 21, 2008, 11:30am-2:30pm, CENTR 224A

Reading assignments:

• M. Specter, The last drop: Confronting the possibility of a global catastrophe, The New Yorker, October 23, 2006. (pdf)
• E. J. W. Visser and G. M. Bogemann, Measurement of porosity in very small samples of plant tissue, Plant and Soil, 253, 81-90, 2003. (pdf)
• B. P. Mohanty, R. S. Kanwar, and C. J. Everts, Comparison of saturated hydraulic conductivity measurement methods for a glacial-till soil, Soil Sci. Soc. Am. J., 58(3), 672-677, 1994. (pdf)
• B. D. R. Misstear, The value of simple equilibrium approximations for analysing pumping test data, Hydrogeol. J., 9, 125-126, 2001. (pdf)
• E. J. Ford, Soil water retention determination using the Wetlab facility at CSIRO, Davies Laboratory, Technical Report 2/97. (pdf)
• D. O. Johnson, F. J. Arriaga, and Birl Lowery, Automation of a falling head permeameter for rapid determination of hydraulic conductivity of multiple samples, Soil Sci. Soc. Am. J., 69, 828-833, 2005. (pdf)

Class notes and homework:

• Class notes will be available in the pdf format

  here.

• Homework must be written clearly and neatly. No late homework will be accepted.

(HW1) due date: Monday, January 21, 2008

(HW2) due date: Wednesday, January 30, 2008

(HW3) due date: Wednesday, February 20, 2008

(HW4) due date: Monday, March 3, 2008

Final Projects:

• Project 1 (pp. 1-61)
• Project 2 (pp. 61-138)