Abstract:

Undergraduate research has proven to be an admirable bridge between creativity and academic excellence. STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) undergraduate research develops students’ skills to properly harness the academic setting with the real-life problem-solving strategies. The college of Engineering and Natural Sciences at The University of Tennessee at Martin promotes undergraduate research through competitive grants to faculty and interested students. This paper is aimed at sharing a research case study of a rain-fall simulator design. Rainfall simulators (RSs) are getting progressively popular as learning and research tools for various soil, agricultural and environmental studies. It is used for investigating rainfall and hydrological processes of the soil such as infiltration, runoff, and erosion. The objective of this work is to design, build, and test a laboratory-based rainfall simulator. This simulator is intended to be used in experiments on soil erosion, runoff, infiltration, and other related hydrological processes that can potentially be part of our civil engineering student’s curriculum at the University of Tennessee at Martin. The students working on this project designed pressurized nozzle rainfall simulators to create the rain droplets under applied pressure by using multi-nozzles. Two undergraduate senior students are involved in this research in a span of two semesters. The findings and experience of this ongoing research are shared in this paper.

Keywords:

Undergraduate, engineering, research, STEM, rainfall, simulator.