Hyoungsu Park
University of Hawaii at Manoa, HI·Engineering
When a tsunami floods a coastal town, it carries debris such as cars, containers and wreckage. That debris can pile up against buildings, a process called debris damming.
- Fields
Engineering
Earth & Environmental Science
- Topics
tsunami
debris damming
coastal engineering
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jul 2027
What they work on
- Measure how tsunami-driven debris damming increases forces on the first-floor columns of elevated structures, using experiments in the large wave flume at the Oregon State University NHERI facility.
- Identify the mechanisms behind damming loads, including debris–structure, debris–flow and debris–debris interactions and changes in flow velocity and projected building area, using debris mixtures of varying shape, size, density and amount.
- Quantify the likelihood of damming and the chance of exceeding design loads, using an iterative experimental design, new dimensionless parameters and supplementary computational fluid dynamics simulations.
More about the research
The pile-up blocks more of the flow and can sharply raise the forces the water exerts on a structure. Engineers do not yet know how large this increase is, what causes it, or how much it varies. This matters especially for elevated buildings meant to serve as vertical evacuation shelters during a tsunami.
Why it matters
Coastal communities facing tsunamis could get safer buildings, including evacuation structures, through improved design guidelines that account for debris damming forces. The results could also point to ways of reducing these loads. They could also improve assessments of how vulnerable existing buildings are, informing engineers and planners who manage coastal risk and resilience.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Barbara Simpson
Stanford University, CA·Engineering·Early-career
Derive massively parallel algorithms for assembling and solving the equations of motion of earthquake-loaded structures directly on GPUs, so that high-resolution models can run fast enough for real-time testing.
Julio Ramirez
Purdue University, IN·Engineering
Convene and support NHERI network governance, including the Council, Network Independent Advisory Committee and User Forum, and update the NHERI Science Plan that sets shared research priorities across earthquake, wind and coastal hazards.
Tara Hutchinson
University of California-San Diego, CA·Engineering
Test individual wall lines and building components of cold-formed steel framing to separate how designated shear walls, gravity walls, finishes and partitions each resist earthquake loads.
The school
University of Hawaii at Manoa: 23 labs on PI Pages, $376M a year on research, 182 research doctorates a year.
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