MNDRAIN Drainage Design Software

alpha version, December 2002

Vaughan R. Voller
Civil Engineering
University of Minnesota

Work Supported by
Minnesota Local Road Research Board and Minnesota Department of Transportation

Software used at your own risk

Downloading the Code

• Download self-extracting exe file mndrain.exe to desktop or other suitable location
• Double click on the self-extracting exe file
  
• This should download 13 files into the directory
  c:\mndrain

Running the Code

A User Manual in PDF is available. But if you are familiar with the Microsoft Excel environment. The instructions below will allow you to get started.

To START program
Find the icon

on the desktop and double click

OR

• Goto the directory c:\mndrain
• Double click on the excel file master.xls

Follow the instructions.

To END program

• The excel files have clearly marked buttons for closing the program

Four Key Points to note

• When you open the excel files in mndrain you will be asked to enable macros
  You MUST enable these macros to run the code --- this may mean changing the security setting in excel.
• You will need to run a number of external files. This is done by hitting the appropriate button Excel will give a warning message each time you do that and you need to OK the running of each external file.
• When you set up a new problem YOUR FIRST task should be to RESET to the base case
  A button is provide for this function
• When you exit the program there is a strong likelihood that you made changes to the spreadsheet data. You will be asked if you would like these changes to be saved. The recommend answer is YES. If however you feel that you have made serious mistakes and would like to start over then the answer NO would be appropriate.
  NOTE the RESET button (see above) can also be used to rectify serious errors.

Checking the program

The code outputs the saturation fraction of the base and drainage trench.
The output also includes a prediction of the water (cm²/sec) leaving the drain.
The output is in an excel spreadsheet and can be handled using standard excel functions.

You can down load the excel file base.xls and use it to check that you have downloaded and run the code correctly.

The Software

The software in mndrain consists of

• Various VBA routines embedded in the excel spread sheets
  These routines are password protected see pasword.txt
• A control volume finite element code drain_m.for This is the calculation engine for the mndrain program
• DOS executable versions of the public domain code EasyMesh. This code is used to create the meshes used in mndrain. The exe's can be found in c:\mndrain\files. It is reccomened that you go the EasyMesh site prepared by the EasyMesh author, Bojan Niceno, University of Delft, for full details.
• A fortran code regrid_m.for This code is used to translate the output from EasyMesh into input files for

The fortran source files and VBA passwords can be downloaded by clicking on the hyperlinks above

Problems Comments

contact Vaughan R. Voller.