Two Reclamation Employees Receive the 2017 Karl Emil Hilgard Hydraulic Prize Award!

Written by: Yong G. Lai

The 2017 Karl Emil Hilgard Hydraulic Prize Award WinnersThe Karl Emil Hilgard Hydraulic Prize was instituted in 1939 by the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) and is given to the author, or authors, of a paper which is judged to be of superior merit, dealing with a problem of flowing water; either in theory or practice.

In 2017, the Prize was awarded to Yong G. Lai and Jianchun Huang; both engineers with the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, and Kuowei Wu, Taiwan; a Water Resources Agency engineer.

The trio was chosen for the award by ASCE's Environmental and Water Resources Institute for the paper, "Reservoir Turbidity Current Modeling with a Two-Dimensional Layer-Averaged Model," which can be found in the Journal of Hydraulic Engineering, December 2015.

Lai, Huang, and Wu were honored during the World Environmental and Water Resources Congress May 21-25 in Sacramento, CA.

The research proposed and then developed a new, easy-to-apply numerical modeling tool that can be used by engineers to predict the movement of dense turbid water near the bottom of lakes and reservoirs.

In particular, the tool may be used to predict how much sediment can be sluiced out of a reservoir with different types of gates and at different depths. Such a tool is important in addressing the sustainability issue facing many reservoirs as many are losing the original functions due to accumulated sediments.

The research is jointly funded by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation and the Taiwan Water Resources Agency. At present, the tool has been, and is being used for several large reservoirs to develop strategies designed to extend the lifespan of the structures.

Published on June 20, 2017