Birth of the
Tabletop Flume
NHI originally used a 2-foot-wide-by-20-foot-long flume as a
demonstration project in the 1980s to teach hydraulic principles.
However, it was difficult to transport, requiring a truck to haul it around
the country. The idea of the tabletop flume – now a mainstay of NHI’s
Introduction to Highway Hydraulics and Culvert Design courses – was
born out of a casual conversation back in the 1980s in a hotel lobby in
Washington, D.C.
“I distinctly remember meeting in (the hotel lobby) with the Federal
Highway (Administration) people just chatting about how we could
teach more effectively, and I think I mentioned how we had a
commercially built flume in our classrooms at the U.S. Military Academy
(West Point),” said Pete Lagasse. “Then Jim (Schall) said, ‘I think I can
design a flume in a table-top size, that would be transportable in a
reasonable number of boxes that we could get to every class.’ ”
Initially Schall’s idea was greeted with some skepticism, he said, mostly
because of concerns that a small, more portable flume would not be as
effective as the larger model FHWA previously used.
“What we ended up proposing is, let’s just give it a try. Let’s take a
part of our budget and if it works, great, and if not, we didn’t waste
too much money on it,” he said. The idea was to build it around the
shipping containers so it could be transported without a truck. The
shop at Colorado State University’s Engineering Resource Center did
the construction, which took around six months from start to finish to
complete.
“Course instructors were
fantastic. Style kept
me engaged and they
promoted an environment
for classroom interaction –
excellent.”
– NHI course participant
Now, close to 25 years later, the flume remains a mainstay at NHI’s
transportation hydraulics courses. While on its third generation, the
only big change has been incorporating more resilient materials for the
frame; its basic design remains. In course evaluations for both the Intro
and Culvert courses, the flume repeatedly gets rave reviews.
“Comments that I see on the evaluations show that the flume is very
engaging,” said Carolyn Eberhard, NHI instructor liaison. “Students will
say the one thing that really brought the concepts home to them is the
flume exercise. It gives them something to look at, feel, and touch. It’s
been very well received.”
– Tawny Quast
AyresAssociates.com
│25