This award provides support for a proposal submitted to the 2007 OISE Partnerships for International Research and Education (PIRE) competition. It involves a collaboration on the US side between the University of South Carolina at Columbia, the University of Puerto Rico, and South Carolina State University with the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium and the Instituto Superior Tecnico in Lisbon, Portugal.
Intellectual Merit. The collaborative partners propose to conduct research on erosion, deposition, and transport of sediment including the mobilization of the bed following levee or dam failure in a unified manner to provide a complete and accurate picture of resulting flood hazard and the associated geomorphic impacts. A three-dimensional model will be developed to study the geomorphic process produced by highly transient flow. The model will be free of many limitations of existing numerical models by coupling the flow and bed mobilization, solving the non-hydrostatic pressure field, and including the effects of sediment cohesion. The laboratory studies will help to understand and quantify the mechanism of soil erosion and bed movement and mobilization by the flood wave and provide test data for the verification of computer models. The two European partners were selected because of their unique laboratory facilities, technical expertise, experience of senior personnel, and ongoing funded research on the topic. Different experiments will make use of the unique facilities at each of the European labs. The European partners offer the added benefit of being part of a larger European-level project supported by the European Commission (EC).
Broader Impacts. The educational plan includes the exchange of faculty members, graduate and undergraduate students, internationalization of water resources curricula, field visits, and development of postgraduate courses. Each year, 10 undergraduate and 5 graduate students, a research professor, a post-doctoral fellow, and several US and European researchers will participate in the project activities. High school and undergraduate students will be offered summer research opportunities, and female and underrepresented groups will comprise one-third of the project's participants. The results of the proposed research will be useful in planning for emergencies following dam or levee failure and the development of strategies for the mitigation of adverse ecological and morphological impacts.
