Clarkson University Professor Weiming Wu was recently invited to give a keynote speech at the International Symposium on River Sedimentation.

Held from Sept. 19 to 22 in Stuttgart, Germany, the symposium provides “a forum for scientists, engineers and policy-makers to share information, exchange ideas and collaborate in the field of erosion and sedimentation processes,” according to a press release from Clarkson.

Wu's presentation, "Advances and Challenges in Mixed Cohesive/Noncohesive Sediment Transport Research," will feature a review of recent advances in laboratory experiments, field measurements and computational modeling of mixed cohesive/noncohesive sediment transport.

Noncohesive sediments move as individual particles, whereas cohesive sediments -- less than 0.01 millimeter in size -- usually erode and transport in flocs that consist of fine particles irregularly bonded by interparticle electrostatical forces and undergo continuous, dynamic aggregation and disaggregation, the release said.

When cohesive and non-cohesive sediments are mixed, interactions between them play an important role, and the sediment mixture experiences much more complex erosion and transport processes, according to the release.

Researchers and engineers encounter significant challenges when dealing with such mixed sediments which widely exist in estuaries, coastal inlets, reservoirs, rivers and uplands.

As an associate editor for the American Society of Civil Engineers Journal of Hydraulic Engineering, Wu's research interests include sediment transport in rivers, estuaries and coastal waters; surge and wave attenuation by vegetation; dam and levee breaching; and pollutant transport.

He has developed several empirical formulas for sediment settling, deposit porosity, movable bed roughness and non-uniform sediment transport, as well as a number of one-, two- and three-dimensional computational models for free surface flows, sediment transport, pollutant transport, vegetation effects and dam and levee breaching.

He published a book, Computational River Dynamics, in 2007.