2017-2018 Undergraduate Catalog [ARCHIVED CATALOG]
Civil and Environmental Engineering
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 Return to: Lyle School of Engineering
Associate Professor Barbara S. Minsker, Chair
Professors: Paul Krueger, Zhong Lu, Barbara S. Minsker, Halit Üster
Associate Professors: Khaled F. Abdelghany, Usama S. El Shamy, Andrew N. Quicksall, David A. Willis
Assistant Professors: Jaewook Myung, Brett Story, Wenjie Sun
Lecturer: John H. Easton
Adjunct Faculty: Yasser Abdelhamid, Drew Aleto, April Blount, Whitney Boger, Samir Bougacha, Mark K. Boyd, Robert Casagrande, Weiping Dai, H. Elizabeth del Monte, Roger O. Dickey, Edward Forest, Hope Hagar, Anwar Hirany, Sina Iman, Mehedy Mashnad, Steven D. McCauley, Mofid Nakhaei, Jon D. Rauscher, Patricia A. Taylor, Philip K. Turner, Rumanda K. Young, Natasha Zamani, Jessie Marshall Zarazaga
Undergraduate programs within the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering educate and train leaders in the fields of environmental protection, resource management, construction and engineering design. Programs are tailored to the individual needs and interests of CEE students, so that students with interests in studying global climate change, protecting the quality of the drinking water, or designing the next generation of high-rise buildings or smart highways receive the training they need to excel in their careers. As part of their education, CEE students are paired with CEOs, business leaders, professional engineers, Environmental Protection Agency directors or corporate attorneys in a mentoring program designed to propel students into promising careers.
Civil and environmental engineering are inextricably linked. While civil engineering focuses on the infrastructure of modern society, environmental engineering is concerned with the well-being and health of people and the environment. Civil and environmental engineering functioned as a single integrated discipline in the early 1900s when it was critical to address sanitary problems to protect public health and to develop regional water supplies and the civil infrastructure to support rapid urbanization and early industrialization. Separate disciplines gradually emerged, evolving and broadening to address the overall quality and function of modern society – preserving the environment while enabling the realization of an enriched life through technology.
Civil engineers are engaged in planning, design, construction, maintenance and management of the infrastructure of modern society. They are responsible for the design of water supply and wastewater treatment systems; transportation systems such as highways, railways, waterways, mass transit, airports, ports and harbors; dams, reservoirs and hydroelectric power plants; thermoelectric power plants; transmission and communication towers; high-rise buildings; and even aircraft and aerospace structures, shuttles and space stations. Every major structure critical to this country, and global society, depends on the work of civil engineers.
The mission of the civil engineering program is to prepare graduates for professional practice and advanced studies by focusing on the following areas: structural engineering, geotechnical engineering, transportation planning, environmental engineering and water resources., Graduates will be equipped with the skills and knowledge necessary to be fully participatory members of civil engineering teams and contributors to civil engineering efforts conducted within the evolving global economy.
The mission and educational objectives of the civil engineering program are consistent with the missions of the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department, the Lyle School of Engineering, and the overall institutional mission of SMU, and were determined based on the needs of the program’s various constituencies. The program prepares graduates to achieve the following educational objectives during the medium term of their professional careers:
- Assume important leadership positions in a globally competitive world.
- Fully participate either as engineering designers or as managers in the public or private sectors.
- Pursue advanced academic or professional degrees in engineering, medicine, law, business or public policy.
- Licensing as professional engineers.
The environmental field is dynamic and wide-ranging, comprising many different disciplines and professional roles. Environmental engineering involve not only traditional water and wastewater management, but also the management of hazardous and radioactive materials, pollution prevention and waste minimization, innovative hazardous waste treatment and site remediation processes, environmental and occupational health, resource conservation and recovery, sustainable development of natural resources, and air quality management and pollution control. In addition, modern manufacturing, both domestic and worldwide, focuses on using recycled and natural materials to fabricate products that are competitive in the marketplace and harmlessly degraded in the environment. The trend toward global manufacturing will grow stronger in the years ahead. Environmental challenges presented by this movement must be overcome if the economic and lifestyle benefits of globalization are to be extended to all peoples of the world.
The educational objectives of the environmental engineering program are consistent with the missions of the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department, the Lyle School of Engineering, and the overall institutional mission of SMU, and were determined based on the needs of the program’s various constituencies. The program prepares graduates to achieve the following educational objectives during the medium term of their professional careers:
- Assume important leadership positions in a globally competitive world.
- Fully participate either as engineering designers or as managers in the public or private sectors.
- Pursue advanced academic or professional degrees in engineering, medicine, law, business or public policy.
- Licensing as professional engineers.
The environmental engineering program prepares graduates for professional practice and advanced study through a focus in the following areas: 1) water supply and resources, 2) environmental systems and process modeling, 3) environmental chemistry, 4) wastewater management, 5) solid waste management, 6) hazardous waste management, 7) atmospheric systems and air pollution control, and 8) environmental and occupational health.
The CEE Department offers undergraduate degrees as follows:
Bachelor of Science With a Major in Civil Engineering
Bachelor of Science With a Major in Environmental Engineering
Bachelor of Science With a Major in Environmental Engineering with a premedical specialization
Students may pursue combined degree programs offered in conjunction with Dedman College . The combined degree programs include a B.S. in Civil Engineering and a B.S. with a major in Math and a B.S. in Environmental Engineering and a B.S. with a major in Math .
The Engineering Accreditation Commission of ABET, www.abet.org, has accredited the undergraduate programs in civil engineering and environmental engineering. Both the civil and environmental engineering programs are designed to prepare students for the Fundamentals of Engineering Examination, the first step toward licensure as a professional engineer. Engineering design is integrated throughout the civil and environmental engineering curricula, each culminating in a major design experience based on the knowledge and skills acquired in earlier coursework. In their senior year, the department’s engineering students are required to take two terms of design where teams of two to four students work closely on practical projects sponsored by industry and government. Senior design projects incorporate engineering standards and realistic constraints including most of the following considerations: economic, environmental, sustainability, manufacturability, ethical, health and safety, social, and political. The department’s engineering curricula ensure that students develop an understanding of the concepts of professional engineering practice, including ethical responsibilities, effective oral and written communication, management and business for engineering organizations and markets, public policy and leadership in projects and organizations, participation on multidisciplinary teams, procurement, bidding, the interaction of design and construction professionals, professional licensing, and the need for lifelong learning.
CEE departmental offices and instructional and research laboratories are located in the new, state-of-the-art J. Lindsay Embrey Engineering Building, which is certified as a Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design Gold Building in LEED’s internationally recognized green building certification program. Environmental teaching and research laboratories include dedicated space for air quality and meteorology, industrial hygiene, environmental microbiology, soil and water quality, and contaminant modeling. The air quality and meteorology laboratory includes modern airflow, pressure and volume measurement instrumentation. The industrial hygiene laboratory includes an inventory of the latest personal monitoring equipment for assessing occupational exposure to a variety of industrial process stressors including asbestos, noise, total and respirable dust, metals, radiation, and heat stress. The contaminant-modeling laboratory provides space to conduct experiments for water quality assessment, to develop innovative biological and chemical treatment processes that remove and degrade potentially harmful contaminants, to develop multi-component reactive transport modeling of contaminants in the groundwater and subsurface environments, and to analyze groundwater flow regimes and fate and transport of contaminants in the subsurface.
The environmental teaching and research laboratories have sophisticated analytical capabilities for performing chemical analyses of air samples and for assessing the quality of water supplies and wastes and the effectiveness of water and waste treatment procedures. Major equipment includes a Thermo Scientific ozone analyzer, a Dynamax absorbance detector, a Hach DR 2500 scanning spectrophotometer for water quality analysis of numerous parameters, a Thermo Scientific inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometer, a PerkinElmer Fourier transform infrared spectrometer with attenuated total reflectance, a Dionex ion chromatography unit, a Cary bio UV-visible spectrometer with temperature control, and an Agilent gas chromatography and mass spectrometry unit for identifying and measuring numerous permanent inorganic gases and organic compounds in environmental samples. Other miscellaneous equipment includes continuous ambient air monitoring devices, a UV-visible spectrophotometer, pH and other specific ion meters, incubating ovens, microscopes, furnaces, centrifuges, dissolved oxygen meters, a Mettler titrator for chemical and acid/base surface experiments, several temperature control baths, and a tumbler for constant temperature studies. An autoclave, microscopes and a UV light reader support basic engineering microbiological work.
Civil engineering teaching and research laboratories include dedicated space for mechanics of materials and structural engineering, hydraulics and hydrology, geotechnical engineering and transportation materials, and intelligent transportation systems. The Structural and Mechanics of Materials Laboratory is equipped for instruction and research on the behavior of materials under various loading conditions such as fatigue, impact, hardness, creep, tension, compression and flexure. This lab is equipped with an Instron 5582 universal materials testing machine, a Tinius-Olsen tension and compression test machine, a Didactec and a Tecquipment torsion test machine, a deflection test machine for simply supported beams, and a cantilever beam bending and deflection test apparatus. Major hydraulics and hydrology laboratory equipment includes a 5-meter open channel flume with various accessories (e.g., undershot weir, rotary undershot gate, and sharp and broadcrested weirs), a basic hydraulics bench for fundamental fluid mechanics experiments (e.g., hydrostatic pressure forces, Bernoulli’s theorem and pipe friction losses), and a hydrology study system for hydrology experiments (e.g., simulating rainfall over watersheds and measuring resulting outflow hydrographs, and groundwater flow profiles). The geotechnical engineering and transportation materials laboratory has a Geocomp soil testing equipment automated set, a Geocomp direct residual shear test system automated set, a pocket penetrometer and the torvane shear device, and liquid and plastic limit devices. Traditional geotechnical testing equipment such as sieve analysis, hydrometer, constant head/falling head permeameter, liquid and plastic limits, compaction, and relative density are also available.
The Embrey Building also houses a dedicated computer-aided design laboratory with AutoCAD software and a general-use computer laboratory with personal computers, high-resolution color monitors and laser printers for use by the department’s students. Computers in the CAD and general-use laboratories are connected through a high-speed network to the computer systems of the Lyle School of Engineering and SMU, as well as to off-campus systems via the Internet. The computer network provides access to general applications software and specialized software for engineering problems, including air dispersion modeling, AutoCAD, ArcGIS, hydrologic and hydraulic modeling for water resource systems, statistical analysis and stochastic modeling, structural analysis and design, transportation systems planning and analysis, and water quality modeling.
ProgramsMajor(s)Minor(s)CoursesCivil and Environmental Engineering
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