Below are the brief introductions and profiles of lectures to be presented at the Joint IAHR - CTGU Training Course on Advanced Hydraulic Engineering
IAHR - CTGU Training Course on Advanced Hydraulic Engineering
The term “modelling” is used in a remarkable number of ways and in a wide variety of contexts. This talk will specifically focus on how engineers, or other decision makers, need to understand and utilize the modelling process for hydraulic systems. The key here is that models – as engineers and decision makers use them as opposed to how they are used in scientific research – are employed as the ultimate replacement of reality with all its complexity, but as tools for making better decisions. These decisions are often implemented in a world of matter and energy, systems that have real human and environmental consequences when they perform well or when they misbehave. Thus, although a model itself may be abstract, it is the matter they inform, modify and reconfigure that change physical and experienced reality. It is this “stuff”, this matter, that really matters to human decision makers! Some general principles of using and developing models of this kind will be discussed as well as key distinctions in the many ways models can be used to better inform system design, operation, data collection and trouble-shooting.
Profile
Bryan Karney is a Professor of Civil Engineering at the University of Toronto, where he has taught since 1987. He holds a Ph.D. in Civil Engineering from the University of British Columbia and has over 40 years of experience in hydraulic systems across water, wastewater, stormwater, oil, gas, and jet fuel networks. He is also a co-founder of HydraTek, a leading consulting firm in water systems engineering. Bryan has published several hundred papers and co-authored several books. He has served as associate editor for journals including Journal of Hydraulic Research and Urban Water Journal, and received numerous awards for teaching and research. His work has earned him recognition among the top 2% most cited STEM researchers globally. He continues to supervise Ph.D. students and has mentored over 25 Ph.D. and 100 master’s students. Notably, he supervised Mohamed Ghidaoui and Duncan McInnis, both affiliated with HKUST. In administration, Dr. Karney led the launch of U of T’s Associate Dean Cross-Disciplinary Programs role, establishing over a dozen engineering minors including Sustainable Energy and Robotics. By the end of his tenure, over half of engineering graduates earned credentials from these programs. Conservation Laws of Mass, Momentum and Energy in Hydraulics.
The speaker will introduce the concept of a general control volume and explain why it is needed in fluid mechanics and hydraulics. He will then briefly review the laws of mass, momentum, energy and entropy as often presented in physics courses and emphasize that such presentations are specific to a special type of control volume, namely one that has no mass exchange with the surrounding. This special type is referred to as material control volume or a control mass. He will then present the extended form of the conservation laws for a general control volume and use it to derive the Navier Stokes equations. The emphasis is on physical insights into the conservation laws and on bridging the connection between how these laws are often presented in physics courses to how they are presented in fluids and hydraulics courses.
Profile
Mohamed Salah Ghidaoui is the Chair Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and the Named Chinese Estates Professor of Engineering at The Hong Kong University of Science & Technology (HKUST). He serves as the Vice-President for Asia and the Pacific for the International Association for Hydro-Environment Engineering and Research (IAHR). He is a Distinguished Fellow of IAHR and a Fellow of the Hong Kong Institute of Engineers (HKIE). From 2013 to 2018, he chaired IAHR’s Fluid Mechanics Committee and has served as the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Hydraulic Research, IAHR, while also acting as an associate editor for five international journals. His accolades include the Arthur Ippen Award from IAHR and the Albert Berry Memorial Award from the American Water Works Association. He led a large-scale theme-based project on smart urban water supply systems, which developed time-reversal technology for defect detection in UWSS. This technology is now implemented in over 18 locations in Hong Kong in collaboration with the Water Supplies Department (WSD), the Drainage Services Department (DSD), and the Airport Authority (AA) and has led to holds five US patents.
Open-channel flows (OCF, e.g., streams and rivers) occupy a special place in a family of wall-bounded turbulent flows. It may exhibit a set of properties that make this flow unique and exciting, such as: (1) unlike boundary layer thickness which increases along the flow, OCF depth may increase, decrease, or stay the same in time and along the flow; (2) the corners at the intersections of the OCF sidewalls, bed, and free-surface induce turbulence anisotropy that brings (time-averaged) secondary currents; (3) free surface acts as a mobile moving boundary and may have significant impact on flow dynamics; and (4) OCF possess features of both internal flows (e.g., pipe flows) and external flows (i.e., boundary layer) and thus occupies an intermediate position between them. For the case of rivers, the list of distinctions can be further expanded to account for the effects of sedimentary beds, flow-biota interactions, and a complex interplay of various flow patterns such as internal boundary layers, mixing layers, jets, wakes, and flow separations.
The speaker will briefly discuss basics turbulence concepts and then review the latest advances in studies of OCF turbulence, including turbulence statistics and coherent motions, with particular focus on recently discovered ‘superstructures’ (or ‘very large scale motions’ up to 40-50 flow depths in length). This will be followed by consideration of turbulence effects in sediment transport, flow-biota interactions, and hydraulic resistance.
Profile
Professor Vladimir Nikora is Sixth Century Chair in Environmental Fluid Mechanics at the School of Engineering, University of Aberdeen (UK). His main research accomplishments relate to the development and applications of new approaches and concepts for describing and predicting rough-bed turbulent flows, sediment dynamics, hydraulic resistance, and flow-biota interactions.
Professor Nikora has been an Editor of IAHR Journal of Hydraulic Research, JHR (2011-2016) and Associate Editor for AGU Water Resources Research (2006-2011) and ASCE Journal of Hydraulic Engineering (2007-2011). He is currently one of Advisory Editors for the IAHR Journal of Ecohydraulics and an Associate Editor for JHR. Professor Nikora is Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering (UK) and the Royal Society of Edinburgh (Scotland National Academy). He is a recipient of 2010 Hunter Rouse Hydraulic Engineering Award and 2017 Hans Albert Einstein Award of the American Society of Civil Engineers, and 7th M. Selim Yalin Lifetime Achievement Award of IAHR. Over the years, he has contributed to IAHR as a Chair of Technical Committees on Fluid Mechanics and on Experimental Methods and Instrumentation, and as a Member of the IAHR Council, among other involvements.
Martijn J. Booij
Flood safety and the availability of sufficient water are important components of the sustainable development goals of the United Nations. Therefore, hydrological modelling and assessment are essential tools to understand and analyse water-related problems connected to these goals and provide accurate forecasts for short-term and medium-term purposes and robust assessments of long- term impacts. This lecture addresses all relevant steps in hydrological modelling and assessment, such as problem identification and analysis, model concepts and model formulation, calibration, validation, and sensitivity and uncertainty analysis. During the lecture different modelling approaches, techniques and case studies will be presented and applied in different contexts. The knowledge obtained in this course can be used to support water policy and management in rural and urban areas.
Profile
Martijn J. Booij is associate professor in Hydrology at the University of Twente, the Netherlands. He holds an MSc degree in Hydrology and Quantitative Water Management from Wageningen University and a PhD degree in Hydrology and Climatology from the University of Twente. His research interests and activities focus on catchment hydrology in general and modelling of hydrological systems, assessment of environmental change impacts on hydrology and water resources and uncertainty analysis in particular. These research themes are reflected in Booij’s past and on-going research projects, international collaboration and over 200 scientific publications. He was and is involved in projects and studies in many countries in the world including Indonesia, China, Vietnam, Pakistan, Iran, Rwanda, Kenya, Germany, France and Belgium. Booij teaches in the area of hydrology, hydrological modelling and water management and supervises PhD students, MSc theses and BSc theses. He has contributed to international training courses in Indonesia and China and provided guest lectures and keynotes in several countries (e.g. China, Pakistan, Thailand, Vietnam, Poland).
This 3-hour class provides an introduction to past and current methods for the numerical simulation of flows of interest in water resources at large. In order to provide useful information for the graduate student in need of solid foundations in numerical methods as well as for the practitioner in charge of large projects, the class focuses initially on why these tools are important in today’s science and engineering, and it offers a historical perspective. Then, it addresses traditional methods such as the methods of finite differences, finite volumes and finite elements as a result of a general approach. It follows with solutions for the advection-diffusion equation using finite differences, and moves to the velocity-pressure coupling of the Navier-Stokes equations. Matlab codes will be shown and provided. Finally, diverse approaches of modeling real flows are discussed in terms of different levels of treatment of turbulence.
Profile
Dr. Fabián A. Bombardelli is the former the Gerald T. and Lillian P. Orlob Endowed Professor in Water Resources (2017-2022, a five-year appointment), at the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering of the University of California, Davis (UC Davis). Bombardelli is a leader in the development of theoretical and numerical models for multi-phase flows, as well as in their observation in the laboratory and the field. He currently serves as the Editor in Chief of the Journal of Hydraulic Engineering, of the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), and of RIBAGUA, the International Journal of Water of Iberoamerica, IAHR. Bombardelli received a degree in Hydraulic Engineering from the National University of La Plata, Argentina; a Magister (Master) degree in “Numerical Simulation and Control” at the University of Buenos Aires, also in Argentina; and a PhD by the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), under the supervision of Prof. Marcelo Garcia. Prior to his move to the States, he was a Researcher in Numerical Models at the National Water Institute (INA) for seven years.
Bombardelli is widely known for his theoretical and numerical contributions on bubble plumes, sediment transport in open channels, the Basset force, flow in stepped spillways, and for the application of the phenomenological theory of turbulence to hydraulics; in addition, he has developed applied research on water bodies in California. He has published in major research journals of physics, hydraulic engineering and water resources. He has more than 70 publications in these journals and more than 160 articles in total. Dr. Bombardelli is a member of the Editorial Board of the Journal Environmental Fluid Mechanics since 2011; Associate Editor of the Journal of Hydro-environment and Research, since 2018; and member of the Review Committee of the Int. Journal of Sediment Research. He has received numerous recognitions such as the Best Reviewer Award of the IAHR (Willi Hager Award, 2011); Outstanding Reviewer of the ASCE (2011); the Awards as Outstanding Advisor in Civil Engineering (ASCE, 2015), and Outstanding Advisor in Civil Engineering of the State of California (2015); the Young Alumni Award of the University of Illinois in 2015; Featured Article in Physics of Fluids (2018 and 2024); EWRI Fellow in 2021, IAHR Fellow in 2025, and various awards as a student in Illinois, such as the Glenn and Helen Stout Award of UIUC, and the Best Paper Award at the ASCE Student Paper competition. Very recently, Bombardelli has been inducted as Member of the Academy of Engineering of Buenos Aires State, Argentina, and has received a Doctorate Honoris Causa from the National University of La Plata, his Alma Mater. 14 students have graduated with doctorates and 31 as Master under the supervision of Prof. Bombardelli. He has also worked as a consultant for the government of Argentina and for the United Nations in Peru, in 2011 and 2013, proposing systems of cascades for the very polluted Matanza-Riachuelo, Buenos Aires. He has delivered seminars and keynote lectures in many universities and conferences worldwide. His research has been supported by the US Army Corps of Engineers, the National Science Foundation, FEMA, the California Departments of Water Resources (DWR) and Pesticide Regulation, and other state and federal agencies and private organizations.
The modern river basin management calls for Decision Support Systems (DSSs) with sufficient coverage of timely data, accurate predication and analysis hydro-meteorological status and associated risks for management purpose including flood management, water supply etc., and capability of providing “clever and quick” advices on measures to be taken (for example regulation schemes of reservoirs in case flood happened). With the development and use of Digital Twin Water (DTW) technology, current capability of DSSs is moving towards timely sufficient data service, accurate model simulation capacity and diversity, empowered by Artificial Intelligence (AI) supported by large language model, which allows the computer virtually reflect and simulate the environment and interaction of the river basin, providing the pictures and hydro-process as accurate and quickly as possible of how the river basin (mainly water or water-related objects) behaves in real time, which can facilitate decision making with better understanding of effects and risks of measures to be implemented, and receive timely response from the physical world when measures are implemented.
Taking Changjiang River as an example, this lecture explains the development requirements of DTW raised from river management practices, introduces major technologies and elements of digital twin river development involving data, model and model platform, knowledge and knowledge platform, using of artificial intelligence on regulation of reservoirs, as well asl various applications such as flood management, water environmental protection, river basin spatial management etc. Discussions are also made on difficulties and challenges faced during the development and use off digital technology. Areas on researches are as well identified accordingly.
Profile
Dr. Huang, President of China Three Gorges University, participated in the decision-making consultation on flood control and drought relief in the Yangtze River Basin for a long time. She led compilation of joint regulation scheme of large group of reservoirs for flood management and integrated water resources management in the Yangtze River Basin. She also carried out research works, and provides comprehensive sets of solutions for covering the areas of flood control, integrated water resources management and eco-environmental protection. As the leading chief of Digital Twin Yangtze Rivers she led the development of Digital Twin Three Gorges Project, Digital Twin Han River etc. using mathematic models and artificial intelligence. She is now busy with advance digital twin technology using Large Models.
Turbulent jets and plumes are ubiquitous in nature and modern societies. Turbulent mixing and transport are highly relevant to nature as well as the sustainable development of the urbanized environment. Numerous examples of jets and plumes can be found: volcanic eruptions; thermal discharges from nuclear power stations; sediment laden river plumes; brine discharges from desalination, heat dissipation convective plumes on nanoscale micro-electronics chips; feeding of bivalves (shellfish) on the sea bed; and space vehicle landing on Mars. Jets and plumes are also at the core of environmental forecast systems for water management in smart cities.
The speaker will introduce basic concepts of jets and plumes in complex environments—ranging from simple momentum jet to advected line puffs and thermals in stratified crossflows. Both Eulerian and Lagrangian methods of modelling the boundary layer type of flow will be presented along with introduction of an industry standard VISJET software. Practically important topics of buoyant jets in crossflow, multiple jet interaction, and coupling with ocean circulation models will be introduced with illustrations. This lecture focuses on the use of simple first order models with analytical clarity in solving complex engineering problems, and in aiding the (increasingly needed) interpretation of outcomes of CFD and black box data driven (AI) models. Hands on tutorial on the use of the latest version of VISJET will be provided. The issues surrounding “plume modelling” and CFD models will also be discussed.
Profile
Professor Joseph Hun-wei Lee is President and Chair Professor of the Macau University of Science and Technology (MUST). He is immediate past President of the International Association for Hydro-environment Engineering and Research (IAHR) and founding Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Hydro-environment Research (JHER). He is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering and the Hong Kong Academy of Engineering Sciences.
Professor Lee’s research revolves around the use of hydro-environment modelling – in particular, the theory of jets and plumes - to address climate-change induced impacts on water security. He is the mastermind behind the WATERMAN coastal water quality forecast and management system, and a recipient of many awards including the 2009 ASCE Hunter Rouse Hydraulic Engineering Award, the 2010 China State Scientific and Technological Progress Award (Principal Investigator), and the 2024 Prince Sultan Bin Abdulaziz International Prize for Water (PSIPW, Water Protection & Management).