Join MSPE - Western Chapter for our March Dinner Meeting with UMKC. This will be a great opportunity for engineering students and engineering professionals to network! Pizza will be served before the presentation of the LEAP Awards and a presentation from Dr. Micah Wyssmann.
Date:
Thursday, March 21st, 2024
Time:
5:30 p.m. - Registration/Networking
6:00 p.m. - Pizza Dinner
6:25 p.m. - Presentation of LEAP Awards
6:30 p.m. - Presentation from Dr. Wyssmann
Location:
UMKC Flarsheim Hall - Room 531 (Toyota Room)
5100 Rockhill Road
Kansas City, MO 64110
Cost:
$25 for Members and Guests
Free for Students
Presentation Details:
Riverbed stability and scour predictions in gravel bed material
Dr. Micah A. Wyssmann
Assistant Professor of Civil Engineering, Division of Natural and Built Environment
School of Science and Engineering, University of Missouri-Kansas City
Accurate engineering predictions for riverbed stability and scour depth near hydraulic structures are needed for many decisions associated with river engineering and infrastructure management. However, the performance of many such prediction formulas tends to be much poorer in the presence of the coarse bed material found in gravel-bed rivers as compared with sand beds. In such streams, the presence of a wider grain size distribution and of lower mobility conditions add difficulties with bed stability and scour predictions. This talk will present findings from recent research focused on sediment transport predictions in the challenging environment of gravel-bed rivers and the development of new prediction approaches based on sediment particle mobility. In addition, the talk will highlight work focused on prediction of scour near porous bank stabilization structures, such as engineered logjams (ELJs), which are engineered structures often placed in gravel-bed rivers. For such structures, the compounding factors of relatively coarse bed material and a permeable structure may both contribute to overprediction of scour by existing scour depth formulas. The implications of these results for engineering applications of stream stability assessment and stream stabilization designs will be highlighted and discussed.
Biosketch
Micah Wyssmann grew up in southwest Missouri, received his BS in civil engineering from the University of Arkansas in 2014, and received his PhD in civil engineering from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville in 2021. He is an assistant professor of civil engineering at the University of Missouri-Kansas City where his research focuses on the themes of environmental hydraulics, sediment transport, and engineering problems associated with interactions of water with our natural and built environment. He is passionate about advancing design approaches in environmental hydraulics to simultaneously support a safe and stable infrastructure, habitat diversity, and ecosystem resilience. His research is commonly carried out in a hydraulics lab, where he uses state-of-the-art instrumentation systems to answer challenging and unanswered questions about river hydraulics and streambed evolution.
