Particle Sheep

Herding sheep with HEC-RAS

---

You know you’re a hydro-nerd if…

…if you immediately think of particle tracing when you see sheep being herded…or fans exiting a footy match…or brake lights as you try to get around a traffic accident…

Let’s try to replicate the movement of sheep movement with HEC-RAS:

So it looks like sheep work well as an analogy for 2D hydraulic modeling (or vice versa!)

Join us in for one of our upcoming course where we’ll build a flood models of something a bit more practical than sheep pens while still having some fun with HEC-RAS simulating anything you’d like to model on this planet…or others!

Check out more of our hare-brained ideas that you can use as tutorial models in this article: Terrain modification in HEC-RAS.

And here’s the original drone footage showing the pen that was used in the above video along with a few others (Google “drone sheep” if you want to get hypnotized by many, many more hours of particle tracing!)

Thanks to Mark Forest at HDR for pointing out the sheep-herding analogies in course lecture slides!

These are 2D examples, but if you see a school of fish or flock of birds, we might have ourselves a 3D analogy.  Physics is ultimately the same wherever you go, and in the end, aren’t we all just particles in a bigger model?