Alireza Bahmanpour

Area of Research / Academic Interests

lireza joined EPICentre in 2014 as an EngD student. He graduated from UCL with a computer science degree, which was then followed onto a computer graphics and modelling Masters. 

His research is closely linked to the current works being carried out at HR Wallingford, the UK's largest coastal engineering testing and research facility, who are sponsoring this research. The focus of Alireza's study is on developing original research on estimating the forces acting on buildings (within an urban environment) due to the impact and run-up of a tsunami. The project will involve combining together results from numerical models developed in the project with an existing database of unique experimental results. The scientific gap and challenge to be able to accurately estimate the distribution of force over the surface of a building, the total force on the building and how this is influenced by the properties of the incident flow. The current project looks to develop computational tools to be able to assess the force on idealised models of buildings, and to develop techniques that will enable this information to be incorporated into large-scale computational models that can assess the potential for building damage. 

In the end the research will develop guidance on how tsunami flow on and around buildings can be modelled in order to provide input to tsunami coastal risk assessments.The work is computational and involves using in-house or shareware codes to assess the forces on buildings individually and in groups. The computational results will be compared against analytical models and unique experimental data from the UCL and HR Wallingford fluids laboratories.

Keywords / Tags

Tsunami, Modelling, Computational Tools, Onshore Effects, Coastal Engineering, HR Wallingford