Open Channel Hydraulics IV: Introduction to Water Surface Profiles

• Understand basic terminology and will have worked problems involving gradually varied flow on mild slopes
• Have a qualitative sense of how flow profiles are shaped.
• Better understanding of Manning's equation.
• Learn how to compute normal and critical depths, E and Froude Number which will get you through much of the number crunching.

You’ll also quickly appreciate the efficiency of using a water surface profile computer package for design and analysis. You might have access to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers public-domain routines HEC-2 or HEC-RAS. You might prefer another program. Computers save time and generate output that looks authoritive. After this course, you’ll be familiar with what the computer is doing. You’ll be better able to instruct the computer, relying on output not because it’s nicely formatted, but because you anticipate what it should be saying.

You’ll need no more than another cell or two in the spreadsheet you constructed in the previous RedVector.com open channel courses. If you have more computational power at hand, don’t use it before you’ve worked through the steps.