Today we started doing falling-head tests.  We began with "play sand" as the cheapest and easily replaced sand, but this was an absolute disaster.  We don't know why the water wouldn't flow through the play sand, but it simply stopped.  It also dirtied the water, so we have a hypothesis that it has a significant amount of fine particles, that are clogging the tube... This was unexpected and quite worrisome at the time.  The complete halt in the falling water remains a mystery, but unknowns are what make it research, right?

Jessica, David, and Matt collect falling head hydraulic conductivity data.

       We then switched to the sand from Ottawa, IL (F-60?)  These runs worked much better.  Students are currently investigating the effect of the vertical location of the column (How close to the bottom can it be?  How far into the sand does it need to be?)  The intent is to figure out some general guidelines on column placement to be used later in more heterogeneous conditions.  We also want to find out now if there are general set-up changes that we should make to get consistent results before the system gets more complicated.  We should find out more tomorrow...

Yesterday (6/25/12) started off the program.  In the morning we discussed logistics and played an icebreaker game with the entire group of summer students.  In the afternoon we broke into our respective research groups and discussed the scope of our project and then started learning Matlab.  I was very impressed with the students' progress in understanding for-loops, if-statements, and managing to modify some Matlab codes to plot matrices that would create specific images.

Welcome...

If you are reading this, you are probably a summer research student, who has been requested to blog here, a friend or family member of said student interested in what we are doing, or you have perhaps mistakenly been directed here by some obscure google query.  In any case, enjoy!

The purpose of this blog is to help us (me and my summer research students from St. Ambrose University) stay organized and informed of our progress during the summer program.  We will be investigating the falling and constant head tests used to measure hydraulic conductivity in streams, through field, laboratory, and computational experimentation.