A symposium on sediment dynamics in geophysical flows using two-phase flow methodology

University Of Delaware, Newark DE

Investigators

Abstract

This award will provide funding to the University of Delaware to facilitate the participation of young researchers and to support travel for young scholars as invited speakers to the 4th Symposium on Two-phase Modelling for Sediment Dynamics in Geophysical Flows will be held on September 17 ? 19, 2019 in the University of Delaware, Newark, DE, USA. The symposium aims at accelerating advances in sediment transport by bringing together fluid physicists, oceanographers, geologists, geomorphologists, and engineers in terrestrial, coastal and marine systems. In addition to oral and poster presentations, the symposium will feature achievements of young researchers and a workshop for open-source modeling tools. The participation of oceanographers, geomorphologists and geologists, especially those early career researchers (graduate students, postdoctoral researchers and early career scientists and faculty) will be facilitated by reducing participation costs. Furthermore, this symposium will be expanded to cover more field observation, laboratory experiments and instrumentation for measuring multiphase flow in geophysical flow. A balanced coverage of terrestrial, coastal and marine applications and including multiphase flow applications beyond sediment transport, such as air-sea interaction and flow over vegetation is planned. This activity seeks to complement the tremendous progresses made in the past two decades benefited significantly from regional scale open-source models and facilitate the dissemination and development of similar open-source models for wave-scale and turbulence/grain-scale processes that started to emerge recently. This symposium will promote the creation of open-source community-driven numerical modeling tools for small-scale processes by hosting a 3-hour clinical workshop for an opensource Eulerian two-phase model for sediment transport, SedFoam. Sediment transport dynamics involve complex nonlinear interaction between waves, currents, turbulence, and sediment particles with a range of particle inertia and concentration. It has been one of the most challenge fluid mechanics problems attracting many researchers interested in turbulent flows, multiphase flows and granular flows. In the context of earth surface processes, additional challenges arise from vastly different temporal and spatial scales to further address pressing issues such as sediment source to sink, impact of sea-level rise and increase storm intensity on shoreline evolution, coastal habitat and the sustainability of infrastructure and coastal community resilience. To accelerate the progress in understanding the physical mechanisms controlling coastal changes and earth surface processes, it is important to bring together communities from the areas of fluid mechanics, physical oceanography, geomorphology and geology into a symposium to share their findings, nourish collaboration and to provide new perspectives. The symposium will focus on: (1) Addressing cross-scale modeling challenges in geophysical flows. (2) Identifying mechanisms behind several intriguing field observations and develop benchmark problems for high-fidelity, fluid-mechanics-based investigations that the community can address in the next couple of years. (3) Advancing sediment transport modeling and promote existing and new open-source community modeling tools. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.