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Dr Valentin Heller, Dr sc ETH Zurich, Dipl Bau-Ing ETH (MSc/BSc) (Civil Engineering)

Introduction

Dr Valentin Heller is currently an Associate Professor in Hydraulics in the Department of Civil Engineering at the University of Nottingham and a member of the Environmental Fluid Mechanics and Geoprocesses Research Group. Before moving to the University of Nottingham, he held one of the prestigious Imperial College London Research Fellowships, a Research Fellowship at the University of Southampton and a postdoctoral position at ETH Zurich. He received his PhD and MSc in Civil Engineering from ETH Zurich. Dr Heller is mainly active in Experimental and Computational Fluid Dynamics with applications into fluid-structure interactions from small to very large scale. The fluid is typically water and the structure a hydraulic structure such as a dam, wall, landslide or iceberg. His research team applies a wide range of measurement systems (Particle Image Velocimetry, laser distance sensors, load cells) and open source codes such as DualSPHysics, OpenFOAM, SWASH and LIGGGHTS-DEM. Recent research applications in coastal and hydraulic engineering include wave-flexible-structure interaction, iceberg-tsunamis, novel scaling laws in air-water flows, scale effects in granular slides or the effect of the water body geometry and bathymetry on landslide-tsunamis.

Dr Valentin Heller

Associate Professor

Environmental Fluid Mechanics and Geoprocesses Research Group

Department of Civil Engineering

Faculty of Engineering

The University of Nottingham

Nottingham, NG7 2RD, UK

Email: Valentin.heller (@) nottingham.ac.uk

2011-2014

2008-2011

2008

 

2004-2007

2003-2004

Overview research topics

Personal research website

Other research profiles and websites

· Staff profile at University of Nottingham

· Research profile on ResearchGate

· ORCID

· Profile on Google Scholar

· Profile on LinkedIn

· Profile on Mendeley

· Profile on XING

· Swiss Geo Web

· Twitter twitter.com/ValentinHeller

· International Association for Hydro-Environment Eng. and Research IAHR (member since 14.02.2005)

· European Geosciences Union EGU (member)

· Fluid Mechanics Section, Imperial College London (previous employer)

· Energy and Climate Change group, University of Southampton (previous employer)

· VAW, ETH Zurich (previous employer)

Membership

· EPSRC Peer Review College since 21.02.2024

· International Association for Hydro-Environment Engineering and Research (IAHR) Member of the Leadership Team of the Committee on Hydraulic Structures since 13.07.2021

· IAHR members since 14.02.2005

 

Editor

· Editor of Landslides (Springer), the Journal of the international Consortium on Landslides 

· Advisory Editorial Board member of Coastal Engineering (Elsevier)

· Guest Editor of the special issue Innovative Model Strategies in Hydraulics in the Journal Water (completed)

· Guest Editor of the special issue Tsunami Science and Engineering I and II of the Journal of Marine Science and Engineering (completed)

 

Technical Reviewer

· Acta Geophysica

· Advances in Water Resources

· Applied Ocean Engineering

· Australasian Journal of Water Resources

· Bulletin of Engineering Geology and the Environment

· Coastal Engineering

· Coastal Engineering Journal

· Communications Earth & Environment

· Computer and Fluids

· Engineering Geology

· Environmental Earth Sciences

· Environmental Fluid Mechanics

· Experiments in Fluids

· Frontiers in Earth Science

· Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems

· International Journal of Marine Energy

· Journal of Applied Water Engineering and Research

· Journal of Coastal Research

· Journal of Environmental Engineering

· Journal of Fluid Mechanics

· Journal of Geophysical Research Ocean, Earth Surfaces and Solid Earth

· Journal of Hydraulic Engineering

· Journal of Hydraulic Research

· Journal of Hydrodynamics, Series B

· Journal of Hydro-environment Research

· Journal of Surveying Engineering

· Journal of Waterway, Port, Coastal and Ocean Engineering

· KSCE Journal of Civil Engineering

· Landslides

· Marine Georesources & Geotechnology

· Natural Hazards

· Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences

· Nature Communications

· Ocean Modelling

· Proceeding of the ICE - Engineering and Computational Mechanics

· Proceeding of the ICE - Water Management

· Proceedings of the Royal Society A

· Scientific Reports

· The Cryosphere

· Water

· Water Resources Research

Previous research positions

 

 

Imperial College London Research Fellowship

Research Fellow at the University of Southampton

Postdoctoral Researcher at Laboratory of Hydraulics, Hydrology and Glacio-

logy VAW, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zurich)

PhD student at VAW, ETH Zurich

MSc project at VAW, ETH Zurich

Current address

Editor and Technical Reviewer of peer-review journals

Wave energy conversion

Landslide-tsunamis (impulse waves)

Scale effects

Ski jump hydraulics

Wave energy converters WECs are used to transform wave power in electrical power. Dr Heller is particularly interested in the verification of the concept and theory of distensible WECs.

 

 

Landslide-tsunamis are generated by mass movements such as landslides, rock falls or  glacier calving. Dr Heller is interested in physical and numerical modelling of such extreme waves and completed a number of project including Landslide-tsunamis (impulse waves), The Leverhulme Trust project, a NERC project (geometrical effects on landslide-tsunamis) and Wave-structure interaction.

 

Scale effects arise due to forces which are too dominant in a physical scale model compared to its prototype and they may result in significant deviations between the up-scaled model and prototype observations. Several on-going and past projects of Dr Heller address scale effects in fluids and granular slides.

Ski jumps are employed downstream of dams to deflect large discharges from floods into the tail water. Dr Heller conducted generic physical model tests involving different types of flip buckets, the main element of ski jumps.

Last modified: 30.09.2024

News

· October 2021: Watch the YouTube video about our new article A glacier-ocean interaction model for tsunami genesis due to iceberg calving in collaboration with University of Pennsylvania, Zurich and EPFL

· September 2015: A new landslide-tsunamis benchmark test case (case 11) is published on the SPHERIC website

· September 2013: A short course about landslide generated impulse waves was held at the IAHR World Congress in Chengdu, China, 08.09.2013

Previous news

· February 2020: The 2nd edition of the landslide-generated impulse wave manual in collaboration with ETH Zurich has now been released here

· February 2019: An open-source article has been published in Scientific Reports (Nature Group) about our HYDRALAB+ funded iceberg-tsunami tests

· April 2023: The new open access article Wave impact on rigid and flexible plates has been published in Coastal Engineering

· September 2017: The HYDRALAB+ test campaign Tsunamis due to ice masses was successfully concluded at Deltares, Delft, The Netherlands

· January 2024: Dr Heller joined the Advisory Editorial Board of Coastal Engineering (Elsevier)

· April 2017: Dr Heller joins the editorial board of the Journal of Marine Science and Engineering

· March 2018: The forum article Self-similarity and Reynolds number invariance in Froude modelling attracted two discussions from leading experts 

· January 2018: Dr Heller joins the editorial board of Landslides, the Journal of the international Consortium on Landslides

· December 2021: An article challenging Froude scaling laws for air-water flow has been published in the the Proceeding of the Royal Society A: Numerical validation of novel scaling laws for air entrainment in water

· March 2022: Dr Heller gave a keynote lecture about Similitude in Hydraulic Modelling at the 9th International Symposium on Scale Modeling in Napoli; the presentation can be accessed under the Downloads section

· April 2019: New articles for the special issue Tsunami Science and Engineering II have been published 

· November 2019: A workshop about landslide generated impulse waves was held at the Swiss Federal Office of Energy in collaboration with ETH Zurich and the Swiss Committee on Dams, Ittigen, Switzerland, 25.11.2019

· July 2021: Dr Heller has been elected to the IAHR Leadership Committee on Hydraulic Structures

· June 2023: The new open access article A critical review about generic subaerial landslide-tsunami experiments and options for a needed step change has been published in Earth-Science Reviews

· February 2024: Dr Heller joined the EPSRC Peer Review College

· February 2024: The new open access article Numerical modelling of tsunami propagation in idealised converging water body geometries has been published in Coastal Engineering

· July 2024: Call for Papers: Advances in Hydraulic Structures for Sustainable and Safe Water Engineering has been launched in collaboration with Dr Stefan Felder, Dr Brian Crookston, Prof Robert Boes and Dr Ismail Albayrak