Environmental Fluid Mechanics (EFM)Research Group

Current Students

• 
  Farid Karimpour (PhD student- expected 2014)

  Farid is a PhD student in Hydraulic Engineering/Fluid Mechanics. His research focuses on stratified turbulence and internal waves. Farid obtained his MS degree from Sharif University and BS degree from Iran University of Technology . Farid is has successfully defended his PhD dissertation on turbulence modeling of stably stratified wall-bounded flows. He is currently finalizing his dissertation and working on a couple more publications related to his PhD dissertation..

For more information on Farid's research on stratified turbulence, please visit webpage

• 
  Jordan Wilson (PhD student - expected 2014, MS completed 2010)

  Jordan is working on his PhD degree in Fluid Mechanics with an emphasis on fluid-structure coupling of large wind farms. He completed his MS in Hydraulic Engineering/Fluid Mechanics in December 2010. His MS research focused on internal hydraulics of mixing tanks using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and experiments. His MS thesis was entitled "Evaluation of flow and scalar transport characteristics of small public drinking water disinfection systems using computational fluid dynamics". Jordan passed his PhD qualifying exam in December 2011 and is currently finalizing his PhD disseration work on turbulent mixing in the stable atmospheric boundary layer. He obtained his BS in mechanical engineering (cum laude) from Lipscomb University in Tennessee in 2009.

• 
  Kyung-Seop Shin (PhD student - expected 2014, MS completed 2011)

  Kyung-Seop is working on his PhD degree in hydraulic engineering with an emphasis on river meanders and associated shear stress distributions. He completed his MS degree in Hydraulic Engineering/Fluid Mechanics in 2011 at CSU. He obtained his BS in civil engineering Washington State University. He is a native of South Korea.

Kyung-Seop is co-advised by Dr. Christopher Thornton and Dr. Karan Venayagamoorthy as his research focuses on experiments in conjunction with numerical simulations of meandering channels.

• 
  Amrapalli Garanaik (PhD student - expected 2016)

• Jian Zhou (PhD student - expected 2016)

• Dapo Aseperi (PhD student - expected 2016)

• Jeremy Carlston (MS student - expected 2015)

• Ajithshanthar Nithianantham (MS student - expected 2015)

Former Students

• Ben Mater (PhD student - completed July 2014)

  Ben completed his PhD studies in Hydraulic Engineering/Fluid Mechanics. His research focused on fundamental aspects of turbulence in stratified flows as well as shear flow turbulence. His PhD work revolved around developing improved paramterizations of turbulence in geopyhsical flows. He obtained his BS and Master in Engineering degrees in civil engineering (both with highest honors) from University of Louisville in Kentucky in 2006. Ben has also served as a graduate teaching asssistant for one year in the CEE Department and has served as guest lecturer in several graduate courses taught by Dr. Karan. He is now a postdoctoral scholar in the NOAA GFDL at Princeton University.

   

• Hyeyun Ku (PhD student - completed December 2011)

  Hyeyun completed her PhD in Hydraulic Engineering/Fluid Mechanics. Her research focuses on understanding turbulent mixing and transport in environmental flows (rivers, estuaries, the ocean and atmosphere) using hig resolution numerical simulations. Her dissertation was entitled "Mixing and transport of passive scalars around obstacles in environmental flows ". Hyeyun obtained her BS and MS degrees in civil engineering from the Chenbuk National University in Korea. She is currently a senior research fellow at Seoul National University, in South Korea.

• Taylor Barnett (MS student - completed May 2013)

  Taylor finished his MS thesis t in Hydraulic Engineering/Fluid Mechanics. He worked on ptimizing the hdyraulic residence times of small drinking water systems on a research project funded by the Colorado Department of Public Health and the Environment (CDPHE). Taylor performed tracer studies, computational modeling and field studies as part of his research towards his MS thesis. He is current an engineering technical services consultant at Innovyze in Broomfield, Colorado.

• 
  Jongseok Cho (MS student - completed May 2013)

  Jongseok completed his MS degree in Hydraulic Engineering/Fluid Mechanics. He worked on two-dimensional nonhydrostatic shallow water equation solver to study the effects of vertical inertia in dam break problems for his MS thesis. He obtained his BS degree in civil engineering from Kyung Hee University in Korea. He is currently a PhD student with Prof. Peter Nelson in the CEE Department at CSU.

• 
  Ali El-Turki (MS student - completed May 2013)

  

  Ali completed his MS studies in Hydraulic Engineering/Fluid Mechanics. His research focused on transient flow analysis in pipelines and open channels. Flow transients introduce large pressure forces and rapid flow acceleration in water systems and can cause pipe raptures, system fatigue, or intrusion of pollutant water into the system.

  Ali is from Libya and was funded by a national scholarship from his country. He came to Colorado in 2011. He obtained his BS in civil engineering from the University of Garyounis in Libya in 2003

• Justin Kattnig (MS student - completed May 2014)

  Justin Kattnig completed his MS degree in May 2014. He MS thesis was entitled ``USE OF INNOVATIVE TECHNIQUES TO OPTIMIZE THE RESIDENCE TIME DISTRIBUTION OF DRINKING WATER CONTACT TANKS". He obtained his BS in Civil Engineering at CSU (Summa cum laude) in 2013. Justin is currently serving as a consulting engineer in Colorado.

• 
  Simon Schaad (MS student - completed December 2012)

  

  Simon completed his MS thesis in Hydraulic Engineering/Fluid Mechanics. His research focused on understanding flow structures in environmental flow. He used direct numerical simulations (DNS) of stably stratified turbulence for his research.

  Simon is from Alaska where he returns to every summer to commercial fish for sockeye salmon in Bristol Bay. He came to Colorado in 2008 and obtained his BS in civil engineering from Colorado State University in December, 2010. He was also a lab TA for CIVE300 Fluid Mechanics which he enjoyed immensly. He is currently a CFD engineer at Alden Labs in Fort Collins, Colorado.

• 
  Zachary Taylor (MS student - completed May 2012)

  Zach is a MS student in Hydraulic Engineering/Fluid Mechanics. His research focuses on optimizing the hydraulics of small drinking water disinfection systems. His thesis was entitled "Towards improved understanding and optimization of the internal hydraulics of chlorine contact tanks ". He obtained his BS in civil engineering from Colorado State University in 2010. Zach Taylor is currently working as a hydraulic engineer for Alden Labs in Redmond, WA.

• 
  Cole Davis (MS student - completed May 2012)

  Cole completed his MS degree in Fluid Mechanics and Wind Engineering. He focused on modeling wind flow over turbine arrays in order to obtain wind loads distributions on turbine blades. His thesis was entitled "Computational modeling of wind turbine wake interactions". He obtained his BS in civil engineering from Colorado State University in 2010. He currently has a full time job as an engineer at Quest Integrity Group in Boulder, Colorado.

• 
  Zach Elliot (MS student- completed December 2010)

  Zach just finished working on his MS degree in Fluid Mechanics/Hydraulic Engineering. His research focused on understanding fundamental aspects of turbulent mixing in environmental flows using numerical simulations and theoretical modeling. His thesis was entitled "Turbulence parameterizations for numerical simulations of stably stratified environmental flows". He obtained his BS in civil engineering (cum laude) from Colorado State University in 2009. Zach Elliot is currently working as a hydraulic engineer for MWH in Denver.

• 
  Jordan Wilson (MS - completed December 2010, currenlty PhD student in Fluid Mechanics)

  Jordan completed his MS in Hydraulic Engineering/Fluid Mechanics in December 2010. His MS research focused on internal hydraulics of mixing tanks using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and experiments. His MS thesis was entitled "Evaluation of flow and scalar transport characteristics of small public drinking water disinfection systems using computational fluid dynamics". His work resulted in a journal publication in Environmental Science and Technology [WV 2011 paper]. He obtained his BS in mechanical engineering (cum laude) from Lipscomb University in Tennessee in 2009.

• 
  Amy Xu (MS student - completed February 2010)

  Amy finished her MS degree in Hydraulics/Environmental Engineering. She is used CFD/tracer studies to study the turbulent mixing in water disinfection systems. Her MS thesis was entitled "Internal hydraulics of baffled disinfection contact tanks using computational fluid dynamics". She obtained her BS in environmental engineering from Tongji University in China in 2007.

Undergraduate Students (2008-Current)

• 
  Taylor Barnett(BS student - completed May 2011, currently MS student in EFM group)

  Taylor is a BS student in Hydraulic Engineering/Fluid Mechanics. He helped to perform the tracer experiments at the Engineering Research Center for small drinking water disinfection systems. He expects to obtain his BS in civil engineering from Colorado State University in May 2011

• 
  Tim Sellers (BS student - completed May 2011)

  Tim is a BS student in Hydraulic Engineering/Fluid Mechanics. He and Taylor helped to perform the tracer experiments at the Engineering Research Center for small drinking water disinfection systems. He expects to obtain his BS in civil engineering from Colorado State University in May 2011

• 
  Krishna Chaitanya (IIT-Madras - completed BTech/MTech student in Ocean Engineering)

  Krishna spent the summer at CSU as an international summer fellow sponsored by the University. His research focused on investigating the efficacy of the k-&epsilon model in modeling stably stratified flows. You can listen to more about his thoughts on the international fellowship program here

• 
  Baird Langenbrunner (BS - Brown University, Currently Phd student - University of Colorado, Boulder)

  Baird spent the summer at CSU as an NSF-REU intern. His research focused on pollutant dispersion modeling in an open channel flow under varying flow conditions using Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD).