On Tuesday, May 7, Dr. Alejandro Cabrera Crespo, researcher at the Environmental Physics Laboratory EPHYSLAB of CIM-UVigo, will present in the “Café con Sal” Lecture Series the talk titled “Interaction between waves and coastal structures: from coastal protection to energy generation“, in which he will explain his work on numerical modeling applied to coastal protection and the design of wave energy harvesting devices.
Numerical modeling is today a very powerful tool in the fields of engineering and science for solving complex problems. Its main advantage is the ability to simulate any scenario without the need to build costly physical models, since numerical models do not have to deal with scaling issues. Additionally, numerical simulation provides data or measurements that would be difficult or even impossible to obtain in a real model. On the other hand, numerical modeling allows for preliminary studies to reduce the number of physical tests, which represents a significant saving of time and money.
The EPHYSLAB group is the main driver of a free and open-source code called DualSPHysics, which is the result of a collaborative effort among researchers from various institutions in the United Kingdom, Portugal, Italy, and Belgium. DualSPHysics is based on the SPH methodology, one of the most exciting emerging areas in the field of computational fluid and solid dynamics, and has been a core research activity of the EPHYSLAB group for the past 15 years. This new numerical method is opening up the possibility of investigating areas that were previously far beyond the capability of any model, but which are now being studied.
During the lecture, Alejandro will present his research work within the DualSPHysics project, focusing on coastal engineering applications such as the design of harbor protection structures and the numerical design of wave energy harvesting devices.
The lecture will take place at 11:00h in the ECIMAT Assembly Hall and will be broadcast on UVigo TV’s Direct Channel 1, and will soon be available on our websites (UVigo TV and CIM-UVigo).
