digital rock scour: cloud-based modelling and engineering

This book examines the digitalization of rock scour engineering at dams and hydraulic structures. It outlines the current digitalization (technologies, applications, issues) in rock engineering, as well as the digital evolution that has strongly characterized the development of computational methods in state-of-the-art rock scour over recent years. The challenges of rock scour digitalization are also discussed, such as parametric standardization, real-time data acquisition, data analysis and interpretation, quantitative rock mass indices, new ways of thinking and digital twin implementation. Further, it presents the major components and characteristics that are needed to develop an environment that implements rock scour digitally into dam safety procedures and dam risk analyses, such as IT platforms, database availability, topology, physics, computational methods, phase coupling, accessibility, portability, reliability, real-time and ahead-of-time implementations and more.

Features:

• Provides an overview of physics-based computational methods that have been developed by the engineering community over the last 20 years, which can easily be implemented digitally into cloud-based platforms.
• Offers examples of the next-generation computational environment, combining both real-time computational power and an up-to-date scour database allowing new parametric refinements.
• Includes several case studies of real-life rock scour.
• Presents the latest Digital Twin developments, which are novel and new to dam operations.

Erik Bollaert graduated in 1996 in Civil Engineering at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) in Lausanne, where he performed a PhD from 1998-2002 in the field of rock scour. In 2002, he organized the International Workshop on Rock Scour at that same institute, and has been responsible for rock scour research at EPFL until 2011.

During the same period, he founded AquaVision Engineering, a company specialized in scour predictions and mitigation measures at dams and hydraulic structures, fluvial and maritime hydraulics, river restoration and reservoir sedimentation. As scour expert and hydraulic consultant, he participated to numerous projects and expertise’s worldwide, mainly in Europe, Australia, North and South America, the Middle East and Africa. In 2006, he received from the American Society of Civil engineers (ASCE) the ＂Karl Emil Hilgaard＂ Prize and the ＂J.C. Stevens Award＂ as a recognition of his work in rock scour.

Dr Bollaert is the developer of the Comprehensive Scour Model, a physics-based model for prediction of scour evolution with time in fractured rock, containing different rock break-up methods. In 2021, his continuous computational developments and project experiences have resulted in the creation of the rocsc@r(R) environment, a next-gen cloud-based digital platform allowing to perform 2D and 3D numerical scour predictions at hydraulic structures and proposing a worldwide database of rock scour case studies.

He is author of close to 100 scientific papers in the field and co-editor of the book Rock Scour due to Falling High-Velocity Jets (Swets & Zeitlinger 2002). He is Member of ASCE and IAHR, as well as of a large number of National Committees on Dams, and Swiss representative in the Technical Committee on Scour and Erosion of the International Committee for Soil Mechanics and Geotechnical Engineering (ISSMGE).