ASCE Fluids Technical Committee Meeting Minutes

University of Delaware, Newark

June 15 (10:00 am – 2:00 pm), 2004

(Sub-groups also met during other times at the EM-2004 Conference in Delaware.)

Present:

No.	Name	Affiliation	E-mail address
1	Andy Chan	The Univ. of Hong Kong	atchan@hku.hk
2	Alex Cheng (Incoming EMD ExCom Chair)	University of Mississippi	acheng@olemiss.edu
3	Ben Hodges	Univ. of Texas, Austin	hodges@mail.utexas.edu
4	Tin-Kan Hung	University of Pittsburgh	tkhung@engrng.pitt.edu
5	Nik Katopodes (Incoming Chair)	University of Michigan	ndk@umich.edu
6	Jim Kirby	University of Delaware	kirby@udel.edu
7	Bernard Laval	U. B. Colombia, Canada	blaval@civil.ubc.ca
8	Herve Morvan	Univ. of Nottingham, UK	Herve.morvan@nottingham.ac.uk
9	Alexandra Pudewills	Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe, Germany	pudewill@ine.fzk.de
10	Hayley Shen (EMD Advisory Board Member)	Clarkson University	hhshen@clarkson.edu
11	Brett F. Sanders	UC Irvine	bsanders@uci.edu
12	Michelle Teng (Chair)	Univ. of Hawaii at Manoa	teng@eng.hawaii.edu
13	Scott A. Yost	University of Kentucky	yostsa@engr.uky.edu
14	Qun Zhao	University of Delaware	zhao@coastal.udel.edu

Issues Discussed:

1. Review of Committee Membership

Teng reported on the current committee membership:

a. Composition: Currently, there are 28 members on the committee. Among them, 21 are from US, 4 from Asia (Hong Kong), 2 from Europe and 1 from Australia. There are 3 (11%) women members.

b. Member Contribution: During the past year, 23 members contributed to the committee activities including submitting papers to or reviewing papers for JEM, organizing and attending EM-2004 conference, participating in proposal development and discussions, and supporting committee award nomination, among others. Five/three members did not participate in any committee activities in the past one/two years.

c. Chair/Vice Chair Change: Starting from October 1, 2004, Katopodes will serve as the new committee chair for two years. Following the practice of ASCE/EMD, Teng will serve as committee Vice Chair and Past Chair for the following year. During the annual committee meeting at the McMat-2005 (EM-2005) conference in June 2005, a new vice chair will be selected and will automatically become the new committee chair on October 1, 2006.

d. New Members and Annual Membership Update: The committee encourages our members to recruit new active members to join the committee. Any scholar who is interested in joining the committee and willing to participate in our activities can email a 2-3 page CV to our committee. During the meeting, there were also discussions regarding inactive members. There were suggestions that if a member does not participate in committee activities for 12-24 months, committee chair may contact the member to discuss about his/her membership.

2. Report on Committee’s Editorial Service for JEM (J. Eng. Mech.)

Teng reported that during the past 12 months from July 2003 to June 2004, the fluids committee (Teng and Wang) received 23 papers submitted to JEM for review. Of the 23 papers, 15 are new submissions and 8 are revised or resubmitted papers. For the 15 new submissions, 9 are from Asia, 5 from the US, and 1 from Canada.

So far, among the 23 papers received, 17 have completed the review process while 6 are currently under review. For the 17 completed papers, 8 were accepted, 5 required re-submission and 4 were declined.

In response to several authors’ requests, a web page was established to update the authors of their paper review status online: http://www.eng.hawaii.edu/~teng/JEM.html

Currently, ASCE/EMD considers the number of papers reviewed for JEM as the most important committee activity and allocates funds to each committee mainly based on the editorial workload. JEM is an excellent journal with a high SCI impact factor value (> 0.7). However, the journal continues to be heavily dominated by papers in solid mechanics, and its influence on the fluids community remains small. There is a need to actively promote JEM among fluid mechanics scholars in civil engineering in the US and abroad.

3. Report on Sessions Organized for EM-2004

Several committee members made excellent efforts to help organize a total of 7 fluids sessions with about 28 papers for the EM-2004 conference. These sessions are:

- Computational Fluid Dynamics (Brett Sanders and Herve Morvan)

- Environmental Fluid Mechanics (Andy Chan)

- Fluid Mechanics of Lakes and Reservoirs (Ben Hodges)

- Fluid-Structure Interaction (Keh Han Wang and Andy Chan)

- Micro-Sensors (Nik Katopodes)

- Porous Media (Alex Cheng, in collaboration with the poromechanics committee)

- Sediment Transport (Scott Yost)

The fluids committee is also very grateful to our committee member and EM-2004 organizing committee member Jim Kirby for reviewing and arranging all fluids sessions for our committee.

4. Report on the Status of Two Proposals Developed by the Committee

To promote ASCE EMD activities and provide better service to our engineering community, the following two proposals were developed by our committee and submitted to the EMD Executive Committee (ExCom) for review and approval:

(1) Development of a Web-Based Resource Center for Verification and Validation of Computational Fluid Dynamics Codes in Civil Engineering (Sanders, Shen and Teng)

(2) Establishment of a Best Student EM Conference Paper Award in Fluid Mechanics (Katopodes, Hodges, and Yost)

Cheng reported the current status of the two proposals: proposal (1) was ranked as top 2 among the 6 proposals submitted to the ExCom. This proposal has been forwarded by ExCom to the ASCE Technical Activity Council (TAC) for possible funding. The decision is currently pending by TAC. Proposal (2) was approved by ExCom as an activity of the Fluids Committee for this year. It may be promoted to an activity of EMD in a later year. The fluids committee decided to start evaluating the student papers at EM-2004, and thanks to the great efforts of the award sub-committee Hodges, Hung (substituting for Katopodes) and Yost, the first best student conference paper award in fluids mechanics was presented to Mr. P. Samothrakis, a graduate student from the University of Michigan. This was the first best student paper award given out in the entire EMD in recent years.

5. Planning for Fluids Sessions for the McMat-2005 Conference

The Joint ASME/ASCE/SES Conference on Mechanics and Materials (McMat-2005) will be held in Baton Rouge, Louisiana in June 1-3, 2005. The fluids committee members proposed the following fluids sessions for the conference:

- Multiphase Modeling (Shen, in collaboration with the Granular Committee)

- Porous Media (Cheng, in collaboration with the poromechanics committee)

- Environmental Fluid Mechanics (Shen, in collaboration with the Turbulence Committee)

- Sediment Transport (Papanicolaou and Tsai, in collaboration with the Turbulence Committee)

- Open Channel Flows (Sanders)

- Fluid-Structure Interaction (K.H. Wang)

- Atmospheric Flows in Urban Areas (Morvan and Chan)

- Computational Fluid Dynamics (Yost)

- Free Surface Flows (Hodges and K.H. Wang)

In addition, a special symposium was proposed to celebrate the 70^th birthday of fluids scholar Professor Robert L. Street of Stanford University. Katopodes and Hodges will lead the efforts in organizing the special symposium.

The conference abstract submission deadline is September 30, 2004. More information can be obtained from the conference web site at http://www.mcmat2005.eng.lsu.edu/

6. Planning for Activities by the Award Sub-Committee

Following the sub-committee’s rule, current sub-committee chair Katopodes will rotate out on October 1, 2004. For the following year, the following members will serve on the award sub-committee: Hodges, Sanders and Yost (chair). Three main activities for the sub-committee were planned as follows:

(1) Design, print and seek signatures for the 2004 best student paper award certificate; mail

the certificate to the recipient as early as possible (Hodges, Katopodes and Yost);

(2) Nominate Professor Robert L. Street of Stanford for the ASCE Theodore von Karman Medal

(Hodges, Katopodes, Sanders and Yost); (Deadline: November 1, 2004.)

(3) Contact McMat-2005 organizers to inform them of our committee’s student paper award and

request that student papers identify the student authors, and allow sub-committee access

to the students papers a month before the conference for evaluation purposes.

(Hodges, Sanders and Yost)

7. Planning for Task Force Activities to Develop the CFD Benchmark Website

The CFD benchmark project is an important task for our committee. Our objective is to provide a useful service that is desired and needed by the fluids community. During the meeting, Sanders presented the basic concepts and outlines of the project, and later, a steering committee of the project was formed. The steering committee consists of Cheng, Katopodes, Kirby, Sanders (chair), Shen and Teng. Sanders will coordinate the steering committee providing guidelines for the project activity and Kirby will develop and maintain the benchmark website for the committee. Each draft plan from the steering committee will be distributed to the entire fluids committee for discussion and action. Sanders will lead the overall efforts.

8. Proposal for Guest-Editing a Special Issue for JEM on Benchmark Fluids Problems

As stated in the original benchmark proposal, the fluids committee plans to guest-edit a special issue for JEM on Benchmark Fluid Dynamics Problems in Civil Engineering by following the good example of the recent JEM special issue on Benchmark Structural Control Problems. During the meeting, four members expressed their willingness to serve as the guest editors for the special issue. The four guest-editors are Morvan, Sanders, Shen (lead editor) and Teng. The specific tasks are listed below by following the normal special issue editorial procedure:

(1) Guest editors develop proposal together and the lead editor finalizes and submits the proposal

to the chief editor for approval;

(2) All four editors share the review efforts, i.e., each editor handles 3-4 papers for review. After the papers go through the review process, all revised papers and review comments will be

mailed to the lead editor, who will send out the final acceptance letters to the authors and send

the entire package to ASCE for publication.

The entire fluids committee will be consulted for suggested topics and authors for the special issue during proposal development.

9. Committee Publicity and Web Page Maintenance

There is a need for us to reach out to the broad engineering fluids community to promote the ASCE EMD activities including publishing in the J. Engineering Mechanics and attending the annual Engineering Mechanics conference. Through the committee activities during the past year, we realized that each committee member has a good personal contact base, and it seems to be the most effective when our committee members reach out to fluids scholars outside our committee through personal connections than through a broad mailing list. Based on this, the committee would like to encourage each member to help promote our activities through personal contacts. If each member can reach out to 10-15 scholars, our committee as a whole can reach 200-300 scholars, which is a significant number.

When promoting our activities, please provide the scholars with the address of our website at http://www.olemiss.edu/sciencenet/fluids/. Professor Alex Cheng, our webmaster and ExCom contact, has done an excellent job in updating and maintaining the committee website which includes detailed information about the committee activities. Once the fluids scholars are provided the web link, they can find updated documents including annual reports, meeting minutes, conference news and links to ASCE journals at any time. We hope that our website can help to attract more scholars to participate in our activities.