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| Project Title | Modeling of Tsunamis and Breaking Waves and their Impact on Built Infrastructure |
| Summary | As rising sea levels continue to pose a threat to coastal regions of the U.S., low-lying but densely populated regions are thinking of developing civil infrastructure to defend the coastlines against advancing waters. To mitigate structural hazard due to extreme environmental flows, Fluid-Structure Interaction (FSI) techniques that are integrated with free-surface flow models are needed. There are mathematical and computational issues associated with the modeling of free-surface flows that interact with solid objects and structures, or soil water interaction leading to rapid liquefaction. The shape of the discrete objects/particles in these flows can produce local flow variations thereby causing numerical stability issues, while excessive local distortions of computational grids can lead to mesh breakdown. We have developed advanced numerical methods for free-surface flows and fluid-structure interaction that have wide applications in the simulation of flow over weirs, dam-break flows and ocean waves. These codes are running on Blue Waters platform and provide a unique opportunity for investigating the resilience of built infrastructural components against extreme natural flows. |
| Job Description | The undergraduate student will be introduced to the process of making geometric and finite element models and perform benchmark studies on a series of flow problems to verify the stability of the new methods and the code. Student will be introduced to visualization techniques to extract quantities of interest and to investigate flow features involved in this class of problems. A critical component of this research will be conducted by running simulations on the Blue Waters supercomputer. The intern will work with the mentors to learn how to utilize computational science and high performance computing resources (Blue Waters) to carry out simulations of extreme natural flows and integrating data mining and visualization techniques to quantify the results. |
| Use of Blue Waters | The Blue Waters platform is ideally suited for this class of problems not only because of massive parallel problems that need to be executed, but also because of the unique features of our code that are ideally suited for the Blue Waters hardware architecture. The senior graduate student who will mentor the undergraduate student together with Prof Masud possesses extensive experience on the use of Blue Waters Platform. He has been running our Finite Element based computer code on the Blue Waters system, and is responsible for modifying the code and adding new computational features to the code. This will provide the undergraduate student and a great environment to learn how to modify existing codes to port and tune them for Blue Waters. Student will learn the nuances of the Blue Waters system and create examples that will be useful for other learners of the system. |
| Conditions/Qualifications | Must be an undergraduate civil and environmental engineering major and be able to work at the UIUC campus during the summer and continue the internship remotely (as available) throughout the academic year (through May 15, 2018). |
| Start Date | 05/16/2017 |
| End Date | 05/15/2018 |
| Location | Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Urbana, IL |
| Interns | Xiaodan Du
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