Hydraulic and Environmental

Engineering

While all my colleagues are completely absorbed in the last fine tuning of their .ppt presentations (good luck guys!) for IAHR 2007 Conference in Venice, I spend my days (and nights) scanning the web in search of interesting stuff for you, the readers. Here’s what I found.

Did you know that your video card Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) has maybe more transistors, i.e. more flops, than your powerful CPU? [It depends, of course, but in average…] Well, now you know.
What *I* know, is the thought you just had: using the GPU for your super-heavy, three-day-long simulation.
(more…)

Hi all,
this is probably not the most original post of this blog, but I think it could be useful for many users who, like me, didn’t know even the existence of more modern tools for the dimensioning and management of sewage and urban drainage systems than the traditional rational and storage (”invaso”) methods.
The United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) created and currently develops SWMM (Storm Water Management Model) a dynamic rainfall-runoff model for the simulation of runoff quantity and quality from primarily urban areas. The model is fairly simple to use, with an intuitive graphical interface, though a great deal of processes are simulated, with a variety of options.
I find it very useful mainly as a verification tool for existing urban drainage networks or those dimensioned by the old traditional methods. Last, but of course not least, it is a free software!

Well, well, well.

I tend to watch at environmentalism (the Italian one, at least) with some healthy suspicion, but in this case: honours to Legambiente! An association (here briefly described in English) that can proudly claim to be the “mother” of this annual review on residual pesticides found in italian foodstuff.

Its name is Pesticidi nel piatto 2007 (un piatto is a dish) and it is, in my humble opinion, a concentrate of good reasons for eating organic, and of course a powerful instrument when talking with organic-skeptic people, category which I used to belong to, before reading this dossier.

Hi dudes,
We are MIKE21 (www.dhigroup.com) model users. But we know there is a software package SMS (www.ems-i.com) that more or less does as the same things as MIKE 21, but it is considerable cheaper. Did anyone try SMS? Suggestions? Hints?

Again, a link for italophon engineers:

my 56k modem doesn’t allow me to read the pdf’s, but if you can download them more easily than me, and if you can read italian as I do, you’ll probably find something interesting about hydraulic security in northern italy.

Have fun.

Italian Agenzia per la Protezione dell’Ambiente e per i Servizi Tecnici (APAT) publishes manual and atlas for environmental specialists. They cover many fields, from waste management to landscape conservation, from acoustic pollution to water management. All the e-book are in Italian.
In 2007 APAT printed its last work: Atlante delle opere di sistemazione costiera for hydraulic engineers. An easy-to-use guide with clears sketchs and all the italian law raferences for managing the coastal areas.

Danish Hydraulic Institute (DHI) and its italian partner Intecno-DHI organize the 2nd italian conference for the DHI software users. The event will be in Turin 10-12 of October 2007.