By Vvon Engineering Team | Published | Updated
How to plan an undergraduate fluids laboratory from the experiment list backwards: choosing bench-mounted against floor-standing rigs, getting supply and drainage right, and phasing the buy across an academic year.
Scientific & laboratory RFQ checklist (TXT)
A hydraulics bench, friction rig and flume can have different water and drainage arrangements. Obtain each model’s utility requirements before planning the wet laboratory; some units recirculate internally and others need separate services.
A fluids laboratory is the wettest and most services-dependent teaching space in most engineering faculties, and the one where a good layout keeps paying back for twenty years while a bad one is never really fixed. What follows is the order in which the decisions should be taken.
Before any supplier is contacted, write out the experiments the course outcomes oblige you to run. Not the experiments you would enjoy having: the ones a student must have performed to be assessed honestly. For a mechanical or civil undergraduate programme, that list is fairly stable across universities, and it drives every other decision on the page.
| Lecture topic | Laboratory experiment | Usual rig format |
|---|---|---|
| Hydrostatics | Centre of pressure on a submerged plane surface; metacentric height of a floating body | Bench-mounted accessory |
| Continuity and energy | Bernoulli's theorem, pressure distribution along a converging and diverging duct | Bench-mounted accessory, for example the EDIBON FME03 |
| Flow measurement | Venturi meter, orifice plate and rotameter, discharge coefficient by comparison | Bench-mounted accessory |
| Laminar and turbulent flow | Osborne Reynolds dye injection, critical Reynolds number | Free-standing, needs a steady head tank |
| Pipe friction | Major losses and friction factor, minor losses across bends, valves and sudden changes of section | Frame or wall mounted, larger footprint |
| Momentum | Impact of a jet on flat, inclined and hemispherical targets | Bench-mounted accessory |
| Turbomachinery | Centrifugal pump characteristic curve, pumps in series and in parallel | Floor-standing |
| Hydraulic machines | Pelton wheel and Francis turbine performance | Floor-standing, high flow and head |
| Open channel flow | Flow over notches and weirs, sluice gate, hydraulic jump | Notches on the bench, the rest in a tilting flume |
| Unsteady flow | Tank discharge and time to empty, surge and water hammer | Free-standing |
Two things fall out of this table. First, more than half the list can share one hydraulics bench, which is why an integrated set such as the EDIBON LIFLUBA basic fluid mechanics laboratory, or an FME00 bench with a family of accessories, is the sensible core purchase. Second, the four or five items that cannot share a bench are the expensive ones, and they dictate the room.
The hydraulics bench is a pump, a sump, a volumetric measuring tank and a working surface. Accessories drop onto it and connect with quick couplings. The trade-off is real and worth stating plainly to whoever signs the purchase order.
| Consideration | Bench plus accessories | Dedicated floor-standing rig |
|---|---|---|
| Floor area | One bench footprint serves many experiments in sequence | One footprint per experiment, permanently occupied |
| Cost per experiment | Falls sharply after the first bench is paid for | Full cost every time |
| Flow and head available | Limited by the bench pump, which is fine for most demonstrations | Sized for the experiment, which is why turbines and flumes are separate |
| Changeover | A technician swap between accessories, which eats into a timetabled session | None |
| Single point of failure | A failed bench pump stops every accessory that depends on it | A failed rig stops one experiment |
| Suits | Hydrostatics, flow measurement, jet impact, notches, small friction loops | Reynolds apparatus, pump test sets, turbines, tilting flume, water hammer |
Compare the proposed combination with the actual experiment list, utilities and timetable. A small set of compatible benches can serve several exercises in sequence, but no fixed number of benches and flumes guarantees coverage of every syllabus.
Municipal supply in most Bangladeshi campuses is intermittent and pressure varies through the day. Design as though the mains will be off during the afternoon lab session, because at some point it will be.
If the department also teaches hydrology or environmental engineering, a rainfall and catchment unit such as the EDIBON ESHC hydrologic systems and rain simulator belongs in the same wet zone and on the same drainage strategy. Deciding that late means cutting a new channel through a finished floor.
Pump motors, variable speed drives and computer-controlled rigs all live in a space where the floor is regularly wet. The specification is not exotic but it must be written down, because a contractor working to a generic office standard will not provide it.
Where rigs are logged through a system such as EDIBON EDAS/VIS, run the data cabling in its own containment. Sharing a trunking run with drive cables is the standard way to acquire noise on a pressure transducer signal and then spend a semester blaming the sensor.
This is arithmetic, and it is worth doing on paper before the tender rather than in the middle of the first semester.
Take the largest section that will occupy the laboratory in one timetabled slot. Divide by the group size at which every student still gets to open a valve and read a manometer, which in practice is four or five, not eight. That gives the number of stations that must be running at the same moment. Suppose a section of sixty students in groups of five: twelve stations.
The required stations can be supplied through parallel experiments, duplicated rigs or smaller teaching sections. A modular bench supports only the number of simultaneous accessories its manufacturer permits. Check that the rotation completes every required exercise within the term.
Consider duplication for high-use, assessed or failure-sensitive exercises based on downtime history, changeover time and the availability of a substitute. Do not duplicate one rig automatically without the timetable calculation.
Most departments buy in tranches because that is how the budget arrives. The order below wastes the least money.
The cheapest change to a fluids laboratory is the one made on the drawing. The most expensive is the one made after the floor has been laid.: Vvon Technologies installation team
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