The Leverhulme Trust project

Introduction

This exciting project entitled “Paradigm Shift of Landslide-Tsunami Characterisation and Prediction” is funded by The Leverhulme Trust. The project will involve the implementation and exploitation of the Kadomtsev-Petviashvili (KP) partial differential equation in MATLAB to characterise shallow-water waves such as landslide-tsunamis. The Research Fellow Dr Ben Constance is conducting cutting edge numerical work towards characterising and understanding of available laboratory landslide-tsunami data (Heller and Spinneken, 2015) and past landslide-tsunami events in nature. This is expected to reduce the empiricism and epistemic uncertainties in landslide-tsunami prediction by enhancing our physical understanding of the underlying processes of tsunamis (Heller, 2020; Heller and Ruffini, 2022).

 

A new code called University of Nottingham Insight into Ocean-wave Non-linear Superposition (UNIONS) (Constance and Heller, 2022) will be released shortly. This code will be applied to subaerial landslide-tsunamis and to a range of further shallow-water wave phenomena such as waves entering bays and harbours as well as other wave phenomena relevant in coastal engineering and marine renewables. Fig. 1 shows an example how in UNIONS the wave field shown in Fig. 1d can be decomposed into a number (degrees of freedom) of nonlinear wave components (2 cnoidal waves in this case, Fig. 1a,b) and nonlinear interactions (Fig. 1c).

 

More details will follow soon!

Home Students Landslide-tsunamis Leverhulme Trust project NERC project Wave-structure interaction Scale effects Wave energy conversion Ski jumps Downloads Publications

Home Students Landslide-tsunamis Leverhulme Trust project NERC project Wave-structure interaction Scale effects Wave energy conversion Ski jumps Downloads Publications

Personal research website of Dr Valentin Heller

Last modified: 18.12.2023

Selected publications

Journals

Constance, B., Heller, V. (2024). Identification of novel Landslide Tsunami characteristics using a 2+1 dimensional Nonlinear Fourier Transform. Coastal Engineering (in preparation).

Heller, V., Ruffini, G. (2023). A critical review about generic subaerial landslide-tsunami experiments and options for a needed step change. Earth-Science Reviews, 242:104459 (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.earscirev.2023.104459).

Heller, V., Spinneken, J. (2015). On the effect of the water body geometry on landslide-tsunamis: Physical insight from laboratory tests and 2D to 3D wave parameter transformation. Coastal Engineering 104(10):113-134 (http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.coastaleng.2015.06.006).

Others

Constance, B., Heller, V. (2023). Development of a Kadomtsev–Petviashvili-based 2+1 dimensional nonlinear Fourier transform with application to landslide-tsunamis. Proc. 40^th IAHR World Congress, 2128-2137.

Constance, B., Heller, V. (2022). New physical insight into landslide-tsunamis using non-linear wave decomposition. Proc. 39^th IAHR World Congress, 6234-6243.

Heller, V. (2020). The need for a paradigm shift in subaerial landslide-tsunami research. Proc. Virtual International Conference on Coastal Engineering, online, 6-9^th October 2020. Extended Abstract.

Fig. 1. Two degree of freedom solution to the KP equation in the Stokes’ regime. The two cnoidal components (a) and (b) interact nonlinearly to give the free water surface in (d). Figure (c) shows the large contribution from nonlinear interactions