Professor
Civil and Environmental Engineering

Research Engineer
IIHR—Hydroscience & Engineering

Country: Romania

Office: 323C SHL

Phone Number: 319-384-0630

E-mail: sconstan@engineering.uiowa.edu

ResearcherID: A-8896-2008

Main Research Interests:

• Flow, mixing and transport processes around hydraulic structures and flow obstructions (flow and contaminant transport processes at river groynes, flow and transport processes around bridge piers and abutments, design of hydraulic structures to reduce flood hazard, design of water pump intakes and urban hydraulics structures such as culverts, study of flow disturbances and measurement errors induced by a boat-mounted Acoustic-Doppler Current Profiler in a channel)
  

• Eco-hydraulics (flow in vegetated channels, restoration of ecological habitats in rivers, fish passage studies for several hydropower dams in the Pacific Northwest, temperature stratification studies in the forebays of hydropower dams, prediction of the flow and bed shear stress distribution in river reaches for mussel population models, flow around isolated and clusters of freshwater mussels)

• Stratified flows (study of the physics of intrusion gravity currents and bottom-propagating gravity currents propagating over smooth flat and inclined surfaces and over surfaces containing large-scale roughness elements –ribs, dunes, cyclic steps-, interaction of gravity currents with pipes situated at or close to the bed, interaction of gravity currents with submerged dams, study of the ejection of a non-buoyant or buoyant miscible contaminant from bottom-river cavities)

• Shallow flows (quasi 2D large-scale turbulent structures, shallow mixing layers; investigation of flow hydrodynamics, mixing, stratification effects and erosion mechanisms at river confluences; shallow wakes; shallow open channel flow past bedforms)

• Flow in porous media (unidirectional and oscillatory flow in channels containing patches of emerged/submerged vegetation and aquatic canopies, gravity currents propagating into a porous medium or in a channel containing a porous layer, flow past porous barriers and fences, snow drift implications, flow past porous cylinders)

• Prediction of flow, sediment transport, and bathymetry changes in open channels with alluvial beds (prediction of flow, sediment transport and morphological processes in curved bends and river meanders, study of the flow physics using eddy resolving techniques, improvement of sediment pick-up formulas used in RANS based solvers with a movable bed)

• Lake hydrodynamics and lake ecology: wind induced circulation in stratified lakes, bio-convection induced by swimming bacteria in stratified lakes, generation of gravity currents like intrusions by diurnal cooling in the near-shore regions of lakes

• Flood propagation and mitigation of geological hazards associated with floods and dam breaks: development of numerical tools for flood propagation in natural streams and dam break problems using fully 3D, non-hydrostatic RANS models with deformable free surface capabilities, numerical simulation of floods in watersheds using 1D Saint-Venant solvers, hysteresis effects associated with flood wave propagation in river channels.

• Wind engineering and fluid-structure interactions: optimization of snow fence design, prediction of wind loads on traffic signs and trusses used to support the signs

• Other topics: development of methodology to assess performance of methods used to generate turbulent inflow conditions (synthetic turbulence) in CFD simulations, recognition and characterization of coherent structures in turbulent flows, close range photogrammetry for tracking temporal evolution of snow deposits.

Education:

• Post Doc., Center for Turbulence Research, Stanford, USA
• Post Doc., Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering, Arizona State University, USA
• Ph.D., Civil and Environmental Engineering, The University of Iowa, USA

SCIENTIFIC MEETINGS:

–Organizer and Chair of the 3^rd IAHR International Symposium on Shallow Flows, Iowa City, IA, USA, June 2012  (http://www.iihr.uiowa.edu/shallowflowsconference-2)

-Organizer and Chair of the 8^th International conference on fluvial hydraulics, River Flow 2016, St Louis, Missouri in July 2016 (http://www.riverflow2016.org)

HONORS:

-2001- Best Technical Note Award in the ASCE Journal of Hydraulic Engineering

-2011- Hilgard Award for Best Paper in the ASCE Journal of Hydraulic Engineering

-2013 – Arthur Ippen Award awarded by the International Association of Hydraulic Research (IAHR).

-2014 – Univ. Iowa College of Engineering Faculty Excellence Award for Research

 JOURNAL EDITORSHIP:

-Associate Editor, Journal of Hydrology, 2016-present

-Associate Editor, IAHR Journal of Hydraulic Research, 2007-present

-Associate Editor, ASCE Journal of Hydraulic Engineering, 2010-present

-Associate Editor, IAHR Journal of Ecohydraulics, 2015-present

-Guest Editor, Environmental Fluid Mechanics journal; special issue focusing on Shallow Flows, 2013-2013