Consolidation of a Saturated Porous Medium Experience

Affordable and accessible experiments with visualization (AAEVs) are simple, yet highly visual experiments that allow students to learn through an inquiry-based approach. They are structured to give students the possibility of 'seeing' fundamental geotechnical concepts in their classrooms, thus providing a strong source of motivation and increasing students' intuition of the concepts being taught. Their simple and inexpensive setup makes AAEVs highly accessible and ideal for widespread classroom use. Designed by undergraduate and high school students (see “Working on AAEVs: The High School Student Experience”), these experiments and corresponding simulations will become valuable learning tools by providing students with the opportunity of actually 'seeing' how theory and experiment match well.

Currently, the following students have worked on AAEVs: Winston Luo (Glenbrook South High School, summer 2007), Andrew Jacobs and Michael Tarczon (Glenbrook South High School, summer 2008) and Jeffrey Gellis (REU, summer 2008).

Below is a list of AAEVs that are finalized or currently in progress:

The Consolidation of a Saturated Porous Medium Experience introduces the concepts of consolidation (setup shown left) and Terzaghi's equation. As shown below, pore pressure variation, obtained from a simulation involving Terzaghi’s equation, matches well with experimental observations.

For more information, please see the following report: Consolidation.

The Tank: Water flow through porous media

The Tank: Water flow through porous media models water flow through a saturated porous media and introduces the Laplace equation and its application to water flow. The picture above shows the setup of this AAEV. As shown below, the results from both the tank experiment and the Laplace simulation match very well.

For more information, please see the following report: The Tank.

The Searle Fellowship is an honorary program sponsored by the Provost at Northwestern and is targeted to junior faculty who show early promise as scholars in research and education. The one year program is used by fellows to explore concepts related to teaching and learning that they can use in their careers as scholars.

Searle Fellowship Report

Copyright © 2007 by Jose E. Andrade

Disclaimer: The contents of this website are free to use so long as credit is given to the Copyright owner

Working on AAEVs: The High School Student Experience

Winston Luo (summer 2007)

1. 2nd year Harvard
   

2. Major: Mathematics, Minor: History, Coterminal Master's: Applied Mathematics
   

3. Additional Research: Research Science Institute (MIT), Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
   

“[The experience] was a great introduction to a number of scientific methods...”

“...the idea of finite differences helped give a lot of insight to various other problems I've worked on...”

Andrew Jacobs (summer 2008)

1. 1st year UIUC
   

2. Major: Mechanical Engineering
   

3. Additional Research: Campus Honors Program (research preference)
   

“I look forward to studying engineering, in large part due to what I saw and learned [during the experience] last summer.”

Michael Tarczon (summer 2008)

1. 1st year MIT
   

2. Major: Mathematics
   

3. Additional Research:NASA funded Physics project (Northwestern)
   

“I think this experience helped me understand engineering methods and ideas and will lead me to consider some kind of engineering major in college.”

“The best thing about the project was working in a group of people at different levels.  I worked with a professor, a post-doc, an undergraduate student, and another high school student.  Everyone has a different amount of knowledge and contributes something different.”