Cornell Fluids Seminar: "Flow and friction on the beach due to breaking waves"
Location
106 Upson Hall
Description
Flow and friction on the beach due to breaking waves
Professor Nimish Pujara
Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Abstract: Water waves drive a number of important physical and biological processes in the ocean and coastal environments. When they approach a coastline, significant transformations occur in the wave-induced flow dynamics due to wave breaking and collapse of the wave height at the shoreline. In this talk, we consider these processes in detail through large-scale experiments in a wave flume. The focus is on understanding the spatiotemporal flow evolution, the wall shear stress with the beach surface, and the capacity for significant sediment transport. We provide experimental evidence for the link between wave-driven flow on a beach and canonical solutions to the shallow water equations and we show that the wall shear stress is dynamically important only in a narrow region of the flow. Finally, we discuss a few extensions of this work that have applications to understanding sediment transport and the risk of coastal flooding.
Bio: Nimish Pujara is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at UW-Madison having joined the faculty in Fall 2018. His research interests lie broadly in the field of Environmental Fluid Mechanics and his expertise is in laboratory experiments of wave-driven and turbulent multiphase flows. Prior to joining UW-Madison, he was a postdoctoral scholar at UC Berkeley and a PhD student at Cornell University.
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