A USC civil engineering professor has received a major National Science Foundation grant to develop models for predicting dam and levee failure and responses to the resulting floods.

Hanif Chaudhry, who already has conducted research on levee failures in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina, will head a team of University of South Carolina researchers who will receive $2.5 million over five years.

It is one of the largest National Science Foundation grants that a USC researcher has received, said Michael Amiridis, dean of the College of Engineering and Computing.

The grant will support the work of Chaudhry, an assistant professor, a post-doctoral student, and five doctoral candidates.

“Hanif’s work has certainly received attention because of the aftermath of Katrina, but is by no means limited to such catastrophic events. Of equal significance is the issue of the aging infrastructure in this country,” Amiridis said. “Just last week the National Academy of Engineering announced the grand challenges that in their opinion need to be solved in the 21st century and the improvement of urban infrastructure was included in a relatively short list.”

“The work that Hanif and his colleagues are doing is related to aging levees and dams, many of which will be facing re-licensing issues in the near future,” Amiridis said. “Through this proposal they will be able to collaborate with experts who work on similar issues in Europe and to educate both graduate and undergraduate students on this very important topic from a global perspective.”

In 2005, Chaudhry watched on television as Army helicopters dropped 10,000-pound sandbags into New Orleans' broken 17th Street canal levee. He knew then the effort was futile. So when Chaudhry, chairman of USC’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, got the chance to study the levees, he jumped at it.

"There are only two kinds of levees," he said in the aftermath of Katrina, "those that have failed and those that are going to fail."

The new research will have local as well as world-wide implications.

Columbia is situated downstream of Lake Murray, with one of the largest earthen dams in North America.

And while there are few new dam projects in this country, the United States has many aging dams that will see their risk factors grow with time. Canada and South America continue to plan and build new dam projects, Chaudhry said.

Chaudhry won $25,000 of the $400,000 in USC research seed money dedicated to Hurricane Katrina research.

Vice President for Research and Health Sciences Harris Pastides saw the $400,000 of the institution’s own funds in the post-Katrina research as an investment to attract additional grants. Chaudhry’s new grant alone means a substantial return on USC’s investment.

Another $719,000 National Science Foundation grant went to a team of USC researchers to study the recovery from Katrina on the Gulf Coast. Susan Cutter, a Carolina Distinguished Professor, leads that USC team, which includes assistant geography professor Jerry Mitchell, history professor Mark Smith and psychology professor Lynn Weber.

Cutter’s three-year grant was also an outgrowth of USC's CRISIS Initiative, which funded 18 university research projects to examine the social and environmental effects of Katrina.

Chaudhry’s $25,000 university grant led to an initial study in 2005 of the breached levees in New Orleans and a subsequent National Science Foundation grant of $100,000 to examine the hydraulics of the 17th Street Canal breach and the closure procedures used in the hours after the devastating storm.

Chaudhry, associate dean of the college, will lead a research team that includes Jasim Imran from the college and researchers at the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium and the Instituto Superior Tecnico in Portugal.

"The five-year study ... builds on the research strengths of each institution," Chaudhry said. "We have expertise in computer modeling, but our European partners have done more experimental work with huge laboratories to simulate design and construction models."

Source : The State