IMPACT: The Project Team

The University of Zaragoza is the representative of the Spanish Public Higher Education System in the Aragon region. It serves presently some forty thousand students in its three major campuses located in the cities of Zaragoza, Huesca and Teruel. Other, smaller sites like Calatayud and La Almunia also serve the student community in the region.

The Area de Mecánica de Fluidos (www.unizar.es/amf) totals about 35 people including 11 lecturers, among them six professors, 3 postdoctoral researchers both national and foreign and a number of graduate and postgraduate students. The group is a part of the Departamento de Ciencia y Tecnología de Materiales y Fluidos (Department of Science & Technology of Materials and Fluids) which constitutes the administrative unit. The Department is responsible for lecturing to Mechanical, Industrial and Chemical Engineering students.

Current research activities of the group focus around Basic Fluid Mechanics and Turbulence, Hydraulics and Combustion. Experimental work is carried out in the LDA (Laser Doppler Anemometry) and the PIV (Particle Image Velocimetry) facilities, together with the 100Kw experimental combustor laboratory located in the joint LITEC (Laboratorio de Investigación en Técnicas de Combustión, www.litec.csic.es ) centre. Theoretical work is based mainly in large scale numerical computations aiming at the solution of Navier-Stokes and simpler equation models of turbulence, hydraulic, aerodynamic flows and combustion. The distributed computing power is provided by a cluster of more than 30 Unix based workstations as well as a cluster of parallel Pentium based machines.

Hydraulics and hydraulic simulation of free surface and other type of flows are presently the interest field of six members of the Department including foreign and national students at the graduate and undergraduate level as well as two lecturers. This area of work has been growing since the late eighties and has developed extensive work in the numerical simulation of hydraulics, specialising in rapidly varied and unsteady flows, including the propagation of strong waves in real world situations. Its expertise and high quality work is well known in the hydraulic community with more than thirty publications in specialised journals and contributions to speciality conferences.

Spanish national, he is a PhD. Physics from the University of Zaragoza, Spain, 1992. Served as Associate Professor to the Faculty of Science (1993), and to Area de Mecánica de Fluidos, CPS-Universidad de Zaragoza from 1995 until 2000 when he gained tenure as Profesor Titular in Fluid Mechanics.

Post doc researcher at Mechanical & Aeronautical Engineering Department, University of California, Davis (1994). Main lines of research along Numerical Methods in Computational Fluid Dynamics, Fluid Dynamics, applied to steady and unsteady free surface (hydraulics) and compressible flows. Modelling of floods. Consultant to PROINTEC, INTECSA-INARSA, Comunidad de Riegos del Alto Aragón, SERS. Contributing papers to Int. Journal Numerical Methods in Fluids, Journal of Hydraulic Engineering ASCE, Journal of Hydraulic Research, Computers and Fluids. Member of the European Working Group on dam break modelling since 1996 and participant in CADAM (Concerted Action on Dam Break Modelling) as a modeller and a steering group member.

Role
Theme 3 (Flood Propagation) Leader. Will perform coordination a steering duties within the Theme 3 area. He will conduct and supervise numerical analysis and model development in the urban flood and real valley flooding sections. He will be in charge of benchmark data coordination and analysis.

Educator and researcher. Teaching assistant in Physics 1990-92; Assistant Professor, 1993-1996, and Professor in Fluid Mechanics since then at the University of Zaragoza, Spain; Researcher at the University of Reading, UK, 1993; Consulting assistant to Wallingford Software, UK, 1993 and to SERS Consultors, Zaragoza, Spain.

Achievements include research in numerical methods for unsteady open channel flow modelling. Contributing papers to scientific journals such as J. of Hydraulic Research, J. of Hydraulic Engineering, Int. J. of Num. Methods in Fluids, J. of Computational Physics, J. of Hydrology. Recipient of Postdoctoral grant from Spanish Government 1993 and Human Capital and Mobility (Marie Curie) grant, 1993. Participant of European Concerted Action on Dam Break Modelling (CADAM) since 1996.

Role
She will supervise research on numerical analysis and model development in the urban flood and real valley flooding sections, as well as model benchmarking.

Spanish nationality, Ph.D. Physcis degree 1999. Teaching Assistant at the Fluid Mechanics Department since December 1999. Studies on Numerical Simulation of hydraulic and environmental flows. Consulting assistant to SERS S.A.. Research collaborations with Institut of Computational Fluid Dynamics in Reading (UK), University of Pavia (Italy), North London University and followed training courses at Von Karman Institute for Fluid Mechanics in Brussels and ETH Zurich. Present work includes modelisation of free surface, irrigation and debris flows. Contributing papers to Int. J. Num .Methods in Fluids, Journal of Computational Physics, IAHR. Granted by European Science Foundation (1998), Spanish Ministry of Education (1996-1999), Erasmus (1996). Participated in CADAM Concerted Action since 1996.

Role
She will conduct and supervise model development in the urban flood and real valley flooding sections, and will be involved in model benchmarking and analysis.

Spanish national, he is a M.S. in Physics from the Faculty of Science, Universidad de Zaragoza (2001). He is currently registered as first year Ph. D. student at Area de Mecánica de Fluidos.

Role
His duties will range from research in mathematical modelling and numerics to model coding. Analysis of model results and validation against benchmark and experimental data.

Spanish nationality, Mechanical Engineer from CPS-Universidad de Zaragoza (2001). Ph. D. student at Area de Mecánica de Fluidos since 2002. Works as modeller in computational hydraulics since 2001.

Role
His duties will range from research in mathematical modelling and numerics to model coding. Analysis of model results and validation against benchmark and experimental data.