Workshop Report: Large Flume Facility Needs

The National Science Foundation supports fundamental research across a wide range of disciplines including civil infrastructure, physical oceanography, geomechanics, ecology, and human – environmental dynamics. Coastal environments encompass many facets of NSF-funded research and face a variety of challenges including sea level rise, extreme weather events, and pressures on built and natural infrastructure due to increasing populations. At the same time, our knowledge of physical, geomorphological, and biological coastal processes including those associated with coastal forcing events are limited by an inability to conduct well-resolved large-scale physical simulations without encountering significant scaling issues in the interpretation of results. A workshop was supported by the Civil, Mechanical, and Materials Innovation Division to address this capability void and discuss the potential for a “full-scale” wave flume, referred to as USAFLUME. The workshop was held at the University of Delaware from May 16-17, 2023 and attended by over 70 researchers, practitioners, managers, and students. Several participants gave presentations on the state of knowledge in physical models, coastal processes and numerical modeling. Additional presentations were provided by NSF personnel and directors, from a present mid-scale research project, and a large-scale wave flume. Participants held breakout sessions to discuss needs and characteristics of a full-scale flume for addressing the most pressing coastal processes research questions enabling new knowledge to feed into prediction and mitigation efforts.

USAFLUME_2023_workshop_report_v18.pdf

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