Monday, June 26, 2023 | 9:00 am – 10:00 am
"Engineering Environmental Solutions”
"Physical models, laboratory experiments, and field measurements can help to solve environmental problems. This talk will give examples of the roles that scale models and basic experimentation in the laboratory, combined with increasingly sophisticated measurement techniques, and instrumentation in the field have played in solving and optimizing engineering solutions to various environmental problems.”
Philip J.W. Roberts, Ph.D., P.E., F.ASCE
Professor Emeritus of Civil and Environmental Engineering | Georgia Institute of Technology
Dr. Roberts’ professional interests are in environmental fluid mechanics, particularly its application to the engineering design of water intakes and ocean outfalls for disposal of wastewaters and desalination brine, and density-stratified flows in lakes, estuaries, and coastal waters. This includes mixing and dynamics of natural water bodies, mathematical modeling of water quality, field studies, and laboratory studies of turbulent mixing.
He is an authority on the fluid mechanics of outfall diffuser mixing and the development and application of mathematical models of wastewater fate and transport. He has extensive international experience in marine wastewater disposal including the design of ocean outfalls, review of disposal schemes, numerical modeling, and the design and analysis of oceanographic field study programs. Dr. Roberts was chair of the expert committee on brine disposal that was the basis for the new seawater desalination regulations for California. He is currently working with California’s Water Resources Control Board on an update to the Visual Plumes numerical dilution model.
Dr. Roberts’ mathematical models and methods have been adopted by the U.S. EPA and are widely used around the world. He is a regular lecturer at workshops for the U.S. EPA on mixing zone analyses and on the use of mathematical models and outfall design for the Pan American Health Organization. He has developed innovative experimental techniques for research on diffuser mixing processes using three-dimensional laser-induced fluorescence and has published extensively in this area. For this research he was awarded the Collingwood Prize of ASCE in 1980 and was UPS Foundation Visiting Professor at Stanford University in 1993-94. He was one of only two Distinguished Scholars in the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Oceans and Human Health Initiative (OHHI) in which he conducted research on the hydrodynamic aspects of bacterial and pathogen transport in coastal waters.
He is the proud ASCE Hunter Rouse Hydraulic Engineering Award recipient in 2022.
To learn more about "Hydraulics, Fluid Mechanics and Hydrology at Colorado State University" please download this paper edited by Hunter Rouse.
Tuesday, June 27, 2023 | 12:30 pm – 1:00 pm
"Early hydraulic research in Fort Collins”
"Colorado Agricultural College (CSU) had the first irrigation engineering program in the country. Professors and scientists, beginning with Elwood Mead in the 1880s, taught and conducted research on irrigation water distribution structures and systems. In 1911, the USDA Irrigation Investigations Unit joined the college faculty to study water requirements, irrigation structures, and water measurement. Their efforts led to construction of a large hydraulics laboratory on campus and a second laboratory north of Fort Collins along the Poudre River. Both laboratories were originally used to develop and calibrate flow measurement devices for irrigation diversions including the Parshall Flume. The on-campus laboratory was later used by the Bureau of Reclamation in the 1930s to do model studies for the designs of the Hoover, Grand Coulie, Imperial, Norris, and Wheeler dams."
Tom Trout, Ph.D., P.E., F.ASCE
Supervisory Agricultural Engineer, Retired from USDA-ARS
Tom Trout is a retired Agricultural Engineer. He first got his feet wet as a CSU graduate student measuring watercourse flows in Pakistan. In his salaried years, he conducted irrigation water management research for the USDA Agricultural Research Service in Idaho, California, and Colorado. He continues to enjoy scientific pursuits as a collaborator with USDA, affiliate faculty with CSU, and a heritage culturalist with the Cache La Poudre Heritage Area. His avocation is water history in the Poudre Valley. In his spare time he skis on crystalized water, floats on liquid water, and hikes along mountain watersheds.