Engineering a Safer World

Logjams create an upstream backwater of slower, deepened water, promoting sediment deposition and flow heterogeneity. Engineered logjams are installed as nature-based solutions, aiming to improve resilience to drought and flooding due to climate change. Using flume experiments, we demonstrate that the accumulation of wood pieces acts as a porous obstruction, with momentum loss proportional to the number, size, and packing density of the logs. This result enables physically based representation of logjams in hydraulic flood models, improving design and assessment of nature-based solutions.

Many visions of the future include the concept of a flying car – a vehicle that you can park outside your home, drive like a car, but then conveniently avoid the inevitable rush-hour traffic-jams by taking off and flying over them. Recent advancements in electric propulsion and flight control have brought such vehicles perhaps a step closer. This talk will showcase the current, so-called, ‘advanced air mobility’ landscape and discuss the problems still to be solved before science fiction can become science fact.

Materials used in nuclear technologies experience constant radiation environment leading to loss structural integrity due to displacement of atoms. Studying how material properties change over 10-10,000 years in such environments is essential for safe and efficient use of nuclear technology. Thus, materials hold the key to a zero-carbon and eventually a negative-carbon civilization. The talk will showcase how radiation affects materials, advance techniques employed to study these processes and the cocktail mix required to develop radiation-tolerant materials for nuclear technologies.