Water Resources Engineering

The program of studies in this area includes courses in advanced hydraulics and hydrology, advanced fluid mechanics, mathematical modeling and environmental hydraulics. Areas of research interest are watershed and urban hydrology, physical and mathematical modeling, sediment transport, river mechanics and environmental hydraulics. A hydraulics laboratory equipped with a variable-slope 70-foot flume, data acquisition computers and instrumentation for measurements is available for research and instruction. Several numerical models of hydraulics, hydrology, computational fluid dynamics and pollutant transport in streams are also available to researchers.

Meet the Experts
Bong Chul Seo

Assistant Professor

573-341-4463 | bongchul.seo@mst.edu |

229 Butler-Carlton Hall

Facilities and Labs
Water Resources Engineering Laboratory

Water Resources Engineering Laboratory

The 1,100-square foot Water Resources Engineering Laboratory is housed in Room 113 of Butler-Carlton Civil Engineering Hall. Key features include a new pumping, piping and automatic control system. The Water Resources Engineering Lab contains equipment and instrumentation to investigate a variety of fluid flows, from basic flumes to software, data acquisition computers, and an Acoustic Doppler Velocity meter.

Laboratory Equipment and Software

  • A 75-foot long research/teaching recirculating flume
  • An Emriver Em4 teaching Geomodel
  • An engineering laboratory design 20-foot long, 1-foot wide and 1.5-foot high multipurpose teaching flume
  • A SonTek acoustic Doppler velocity meter
  • An Armfield multi-pump test rig
  • An Armfield drainage and seepage tank
  • An Armfield pipe flow friction measurements apparatus
  • In-house-built portable rainfall simulator
  • In-house-built automated soil-erosion water tunnel

The laboratory has access to numerical models for hydraulics, hydrology and hydrodynamics.

Research/teaching recirculating flume

The 75-foot long flume was obtained from the University of California-Santa Barbara. In addition to hands-on demonstrations, laboratory work and special projects for students, the 75-foot flume can also be used to perform research projects on stream flow hydraulics, channel morpho-dynamics, river engineering, sediment transport, erosion problems, stream restoration, simulation of benthic environments, stream bed remediation, stream eco-hydraulics and to pursue research in cooperation with interested government agencies such as the U.S. Geological Survey.

Specifics of the flume are:

  • The flume has a total length of 75-feet, with a working channel that is 70-feet long, 3.5-feet wide and 3-feet deep
  • A tilting mechanism allows the flume to be tilted from 0% to a 5% slope
  • The discharge in the flume can be varied up to 7 cubic feet per second once connected to the laboratory supply line
  • The flume will be capable of transporting water and sediments