Tian-Jian “Tom” Hsu

Donald C. Phillips Professor of Civil, Construction and Environmental Engineering

"Understanding Multi-Scale, Multi-Physics Coastal Processes with High-Performance Computing"

Designing, mitigating, and predicting the impacts of storms and sea-level rise on coastal communities require a comprehensive understanding of complex coastal processes, such as beach erosion, scour around structures, and surface water-groundwater dynamics. To this end, high-fidelity numerical simulations resolving the multi-physics processes are essential tools to gain insight into the coupled nonlinear dynamics and to further develop reduced-complexity models. In this talk, Hsu will present research efforts in the past decade to create an open-source, high-fidelity, multi-phase numerical model for coastal sediment transport applications, called SedFoam. He will discuss particularly a subset of topics that harnesses the high-performance computing resources available at the University of Delaware, including 1) wave-driven sediment transport and resulting beach erosion/recovery, and 2) bedform evolution. To frame these research topics with future perspectives, Hsu will further introduce two recent cross-disciplinary research efforts.  With a large amount of high-fidelity simulation data, it is feasible to utilize machine learning to provide efficient predictions or to create a surrogate model for a computationally-intensive high-fidelity model. The long-term goal is to utilize machine learning to revolutionize our capability to solve multi-scale coastal process challenges. This effort is in collaboration with researchers in the AI Center of Excellence (AICoE) facilitated by the ongoing NSF DARSE (Democratizing Access to Research Software Engineering) project. Through collaboration with researchers in the Delaware Environmental Institute (DENIN), we extend the capabilities of the multi-phase model, SedFoam, to simulate solute mass flux across the water-sediment interface while concurrently simulate sediment transport as a holistic system. The long term goal is to expand the existing high-fidelity numerical modeling capabilities for studying water quality and ecosystem processes.

BIOGRAPHY

Tian-Jian Hsu “Tom” is the Donald C. Phillips Professor of Civil, Construction and Environmental Engineering at the University of Delaware. He has served as the Director of the Center for Applied Coastal Research since July 2020. Hsu earned a bachelor’s degree in ocean engineering from National Taiwan University in 1994 and a Ph.D. degree in civil engineering from Cornell University in 2002. Before joining UD, he was a postdoctoral scholar and assistant scientist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and an assistant professor of University of Florida. He received an NSF Early Career Development (CAREER) Award in 2007. He was also the recipient of the 2021 Hans Albert Einstein Award (ASCE) for his research contribution in sediment transport. Hsu served as the associate editor of Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans from 2011 to 2019. Currently, he serves as the guest editor for a special issue of swash zone processes for Coastal Engineering. In 2020, he served as guest editor for a special issue on two-phase modeling for sediment dynamics for the European Journal of Mechanics - B/Fluid. Between 2015 to 2019, he was elected as an executive committee member of Community Surface Dynamics and System (CSDMS) and the chair of Cyberinformatics and Numerics Working group of CSDMS. Hsu’s main research covers numerical modeling/simulation of various sediment transport problems, including wave-driven sediment transport, flocculation of cohesive sediments and their interaction with spilt oil and organic matters. Hsu’s research team devoted major efforts to create open-source numerical modeling tools for nearshore processes and sediment transport in the OpenFOAM framework.