George
Constantinescu

1) Flow and transport processes in and around hydraulic structures and flow obstructions (flow and contaminant transport processes at river groynes, flow and transport processes around bridge piers and abutments, flow over river bedforms, flow through water pump intakes, study of flow disturbances and measurement errors induced by a boat-mounted Acoustic-Doppler Current Profiler ADCP in a channel)

2) Stratified flows (study of the physics of intrusion gravity currents and bottom-propagating gravity currents over smooth flat and inclined surfaces and over surfaces containing large-scale roughness elements –ribs, dunes, cyclic steps-, interaction of gravity currents with pipes situated at or close to the bottom of the ocean, interaction of gravity currents with submerged dams, study of the ejection of a non-buoyant or buoyant miscible contaminant from a rectangular bottom-river cavity)

3) Prediction of flow, sediment transport, and bathymetry changes in open channels with loose beds (prediction of flow, sediment transport and morphological processes in curved bends and river meanders, study of the flow physics using eddy resolving techniques)

4) Shallow flows (shallow mixing layers and shallow wakes, study of flows at river confluences, influence of large-scale bed roughness)

5) Eco-hydraulics (restoration of ecological habitats in rivers, fish passage studies for several hydropower dams in the Pacific Northwest, temperature stratification studies, prediction of the flow and bed shear stress distribution in river reaches for mussel population models, flow around isolated and clusters of freshwater mussels)

6) Flow in porous media (flow in channels containing patches of vegetation and aquatic canopies, gravity currents propagating into a porous medium or in a channel containing a porous layer, air flow past porous fences and snow drift implications, flow past porous cylinders, snow fence design)

7) Computational fluid dynamics and large-scale parallel computing

8) Large Eddy Simulation (LES) and hybrid RANS-LES approaches

Dr. Constantinescu is a Professor in the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department at the University of Iowa and a Research Engineer at IIHR-Hydroscience and Engineering.
His research program is based on the use of eddy-resolving simulations to understand the physics of several important classes of environmental and geo-physical flows. Dr. Constantinescu’s current research focuses on turbulence and transport in rivers and lakes, stratified flows, shallow flows, eco-hydraulics, numerical modeling of floods and flow in porous media.