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 F. R. Bollaert is President of AquaVision Engineering Llc, a company specialized in rock scour engineering and hydraulics of dams and spillways. He holds a MSc in Civil Engineering since 1996 and a PhD degree in hydraulics and rock mechanics from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) in Lausanne since 2001.

He is an internationally known expert in scour and erosion problems downstream of dams and appurtenant structures and has been involved in many scour problems related to dam spillways worldwide.

He is the developer of the Comprehensive Scour Model, comprising several physics-based computational methods for rock mass fracturing and rock block uplift, and used to design scour mitigation measures at the iconic scour hole of Kariba Dam in Zambia-Zimbabwe.

Dr Bollaert co-organized the "International Workshop on Rock Scour" in Lausanne (EPFL) in 2001. He authored close to 100 scientific papers on the topic and is co-editor of the book Rock Scour due to Falling High-Velocity Jets, published in 2002 (Swets & Zeitlinger, The Netherlands). His work has been incorporated into several international guidelines, among others those of the US Society on Dams, the US Federal Highway Administration and the American Society of Civil Engineers.

Dr Bollaert is the developer of the rocsc@r® environment and its related digital platforms allowing advanced comparative scour computations, database storage and digital twin developments for rock scour.