David Harbor
Washington and Lee University, VA·Earth & Environmental Science
Fast-flowing water can rip whole blocks out of cracked bedrock. This process, called hydraulic plucking, is one of the main ways rivers carve landscapes.
- Fields
Earth & Environmental Science
Engineering
- Topics
rock scour
hydraulic plucking
bedrock erosion
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through May 2027
What they work on
- Run scaled flume experiments on fractured rock blocks to measure how rock mass properties and flow conditions together control when hydraulic plucking begins.
- Simulate rock scour with coupled Discrete Element Method and Lattice Boltzmann Method models, which track individual blocks and the water around them, to find the main failure modes.
- Identify the multi-block and fluid features most critical to plucking, to inform scour hazard assessment, infrastructure remediation and landscape evolution models, and release software and data openly.
More about the research
It also threatens dams and bridges, because eroding large volumes of rock can undermine their foundations. Current methods for judging scour risk are largely based on past observations rather than physics. They also do not account for how different rock and flow properties can combine to make plucking start more easily.
Why it matters
Engineers responsible for dams, bridges and other structures near water could use these results to judge rock scour risk more accurately and choose the most efficient designs or repairs. This could reduce safety and operational problems from undermined foundations. Geoscientists would gain better estimates of bedrock erosion rates in rivers, along with open-source software and data.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Katharine Huntington
University of Washington, WA·Earth & Environmental Science
Determine the source, depositional age and grain-size distribution of megaflood deposits along the Yarlung-Siang-Brahmaputra river system in the eastern Himalaya, using field observations and laboratory analytical tools.
Mohammad Khosravi
Montana State University, MT·Engineering
Determine how microstructural features such as grain size, ice content and void structure control the large-scale mechanical properties of permafrost, using X-ray computed tomography imaging of frozen soil.
Liangping Li
South Dakota School of Mines and Technology, SD·Earth & Environmental Science
Model how hydraulic fractures spread during stimulation of deep rock, using Idaho National Laboratory's network flow-discrete element model and experiments at the Sanford Underground Research Facility.
The school
Washington and Lee University: 1 labs on PI Pages.
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