9th International Conference on Fluvial Hydraulics – River Flow 2018

WISE CDT students, Elli Mitrou (Cardiff University) and Ioanna Stamataki (University of Bath) attended the 9th International Conference on Fluvial Hydraulics, River Flow 2018 in Lyon, France. River Flow was a 3-day (5-8 September) international conference focusing on river engineering and fluvial hydraulics with four parallel sessions running every day.

This year’s theme was “extreme events”, such as floods and droughts. Other topics included experimental and computational hydrodynamics, fluid processes of sediments and pollutants in rivers, river morphodynamics, river management and restoration, river interaction with structures, urban flooding and laboratory and field-testing measurements.

The event was attended by academics, consultants and policy makers from around the world. Ioanna presented her conference paper “Study of dam break flow interaction with urban settlements over a sloping channel” in the Urban Floods session and Elli presented her conference paper “An Eulerian-Lagrangian numerical method to predict bubbly flows” in the Fluid Mechanics and Sediment Processes poster session.

Elli also attended a technical visit at the Hydropower plant and boats’ lock of CNR (Companie Nationale du Rhone) installation at Bourg Les Valence and the restoration works of River Isere in the south of Lyon. The technical tour was followed by lunch at the restaurant “Le quai” at the banks of river Rhone and a visit at the City of Chocolate “Valrhona” located at Tain-l’Hermitage in the heart of the Rhone Valley.

Both Elli and Ioanna enjoyed the diversity of the talks on offer and the opportunity to discuss their work with a variety of people. Lyon is a beautiful city constructed around the confluence of two major rivers, the Rhône and the Saône and the amazing weather during those days gave them the opportunity to rent bikes and ride to and from the conference along the river path.