Seminar Series: Environmental Fluid Mechanics/Hydrology

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TBA
Thu, 02/16/2012 | 04:00 pm | Room 48-316

TBA

TBA

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TBA
Thu, 02/23/2012 | 04:00 pm | Room 48-316

TBA

TBA

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Impact of Mixing-Controlled Reactions on Subsurface Fate and Transport: Pore-Scale Simulation and Experiments
Thu, 03/01/2012 | 04:00 pm | Room 48-316

Several studies have demonstrated the important role played by mixing-controlled reactions in porous media. For example, transverse mixing of nutrients along the fringes of a contaminant plume is often the limiting step that controls overall...

Albert J. Valocchi, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

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Mass and momentum exchange in compound open-channel flows
Thu, 03/08/2012 | 04:00 pm | Room 48-316

Compound open-channels consist of a main channel that carries the bank-full, more frequent discharges and a floodplain that is inundated during flood flows. This channel morphology is ubiquitous in the natural and man-made environment and has...

Thorsten Stoesser, School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology

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Assessing Long-Term Flood Risk from Tropical Cyclones
Thu, 03/15/2012 | 04:00 pm | Room 48-316

Freshwater flooding is among the very top hazards of tropical cyclones, accounting for much of the loss of life and property damage associated with these storms. Yet tropical cyclones are infrequent enough that assessing flood risk from...

Kerry Emanuel, Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, MIT

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Towards a transport equation that acknowledges mixing and spreading rates
Thu, 03/22/2012 | 04:00 pm | Room 48-316

Solute transport has been traditionally simulated with the advection-dispersion equation (ADE), even though this equation fails to reproduce many field observations (scale dependence of dispersion, time dependence of kinematic porosity, tailing,...

Jesus Carrera, Spanish National Research Council (IDAEA-CSIC), Barcelona, Spain

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River basin metabolism: co-organization of vegetation and runoff dynamics
Thu, 04/05/2012 | 04:00 pm | Room 48-316

The metabolism of a river basin is defined as the set of processes through which the basin maintains its structure and respond to its environment. A principle of of equal metabolic rate per unit area throughout the basin structure is developed...

Ignacio Rodriguez-Iturbe, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Princeton University

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Guidance and control of fish shoals using biomimetic robots
Thu, 04/12/2012 | 04:00 pm | Room 48-316

Engineering designs of robots and control systems are often inspired by nature. Recently developed biomimetic robots are barely distinguishable from their animal counterparts. Many cooperative control algorithms for multivehicle teams and mobile...

Maurizio Porfiri, Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Polytechnic Institute of New York University

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Regional Climate Modeling over West Africa
Thu, 04/19/2012 | 04:00 pm | Room 48-316

TBA

Marc Pace Marcella, MIT

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Flapping flight from flexing foils
Thu, 04/26/2012 | 04:00 pm | Room 48-316

Many large insects power their flight with flexible wings that undergo remarkable deformations. The structural dynamics of wings and their interactions with fluid forces forms a fluid-solid coupling problem that is a focus of past and current...

Tom Daniel, Biology Department, University of Washington

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On the form of fish and trees
Thu, 05/03/2012 | 04:00 pm | Room 48-316

During this talk, I will consider two distinct problems of fluid-structure interactions applied to biological systems.

Christophe Eloy, UC San Diego & Aix-Marseille University, France

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What is happening inside a biofilm? Some Fluid Mechanical Adaptations
Thu, 05/10/2012 | 04:00 pm | Room 48-316

Bacterial biofilms are interface-associated colonies of bacteria embedded in an extracellular matrix that is composed primarily of polymers and proteins.

Michael Brenner, School of Engineering and Applied Sciences Kavli Insitute for Bionano Science and Technology, Harvard University

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Quantification of Connectivity in the Coastal Ocean and its Ecological and Societal Application
Thu, 05/17/2012 | 04:00 pm | Room 48-316

Many important science problems in coastal marine ecology and their related management applications require knowledge of the connectivity of one nearshore site with a nearby one. These connections can be via the transport of dissolved...

Dave Siegel, Earth Research Institute, University of California, Santa Barbara

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