Chasing System Understanding

This class kicked my butt. And it was an all time favorite. Professor Christie Hegermiller "described and analyzed the complex fluid statics and flows" which have enthralled my investigation of the natural environment. I've been painting with water colors most of my life and quietly observing the tessellations, fractals, meanderings, foams, and waves in the natural world around me. This class taught me how to change those questions from dried pigments and water to Dürers, Holmes Nicholls, Cézannes, O’Keeffes and Hoppers. That's my gratuitous way of saying I got to look beyond idealized questions, I got to work with the mess and patterns and beauty of the real world. At least, in my eyes. 

So often in engineering, we look to simplify, to optimize our assessments. We still did that, but Professor Hegermiller's class brought us an actualized understanding of these principles and environments. Removing those simplifications, lets you take in the world. 

I chose to share  this piece below as it considers Bernoulli's principle and the      

relationships between pressure and velocity. Their proportionalities  in our project suggested that the friction factor (representing pressure loss per unit length of the pipe) is consistent for any flow. In lab, we looked at pipe loss. Outside, we can look at the xylem and tracheids in Spruce, their transport of water, and get to regard just how unbelievable the hydrologic architecture of conifers truly are.