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Dr Valentin Heller, Dr sc ETH Zurich, Dipl Bau-Ing ETH (MSc/BSc) (Civil Engineering) |
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Introduction |
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Dr Valentin Heller is currently an Associate Professor in Hydraulics in the Department of Civil Engineering at the University of Nottingham and a member of the Environmental Fluid Mechanics and Geoprocesses Research Group. Before moving to the University of Nottingham, he held one of the prestigious Imperial College London Research Fellowships, a Research Fellowship at the University of Southampton and a postdoctoral position at ETH Zurich. He received his PhD and MSc in Civil Engineering from ETH Zurich. Dr Heller is mainly active in Experimental and Computational Fluid Dynamics with applications into fluid-structure interactions from small to very large scale. The fluid is typically water and the structure a hydraulic structure such as a dam, wall, landslide or iceberg. His research team applies a wide range of measurement systems (Particle Image Velocimetry, laser distance sensors, load cells) and open source codes such as DualSPHysics, OpenFOAM, SWASH and LIGGGHTS-DEM. Recent research applications in coastal and hydraulic engineering include wave-flexible-structure interaction, iceberg-tsunamis, novel scaling laws in air-water flows, scale effects in granular slides or the effect of the water body geometry and bathymetry on landslide-tsunamis. |
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Dr Valentin Heller Associate Professor Environmental Fluid Mechanics and Geoprocesses Research Group Department of Civil Engineering Faculty of Engineering The University of Nottingham Nottingham, NG7 2RD, UK |
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2011-2014 2008-2011 2008
2004-2007 2003-2004 |
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Overview research topics |
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Personal research website |
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Other research profiles and websites |
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· Staff profile at University of Nottingham · Research profile on ResearchGate · ORCID · Profile on Google Scholar · Profile on LinkedIn · Profile on Mendeley · Profile on XING · Swiss Geo Web · Twitter twitter.com/ValentinHeller · International Association for Hydro-Environment Eng. and Research IAHR (member since 14.02.2005) · European Geosciences Union EGU (member) · Fluid Mechanics Section, Imperial College London (previous employer) · Energy and Climate Change group, University of Southampton (previous employer) · VAW, ETH Zurich (previous employer) |
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Previous research positions
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Imperial College London Research Fellowship Research Fellow at the University of Southampton Postdoctoral Researcher at Laboratory of Hydraulics, Hydrology and Glacio- logy VAW, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zurich) PhD student at VAW, ETH Zurich MSc project at VAW, ETH Zurich |
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Current address |
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Editor and Technical Reviewer of peer-review journals |
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Wave energy conversion |
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Landslide-tsunamis (impulse waves) |
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Scale effects |
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Ski jump hydraulics |
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Wave energy converters WECs are used to transform wave power in electrical power. Dr Heller is particularly interested in the verification of the concept and theory of distensible WECs.
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Landslide-tsunamis are generated by mass movements such as landslides, rock falls or glacier calving. Dr Heller is interested in physical and numerical modelling of such extreme waves and completed a number of project including Landslide-tsunamis (impulse waves), The Leverhulme Trust project, a NERC project (geometrical effects on landslide-tsunamis) and Wave-structure interaction.
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Scale effects arise due to forces which are too dominant in a physical scale model compared to its prototype and they may result in significant deviations between the up-scaled model and prototype observations. Several on-going and past projects of Dr Heller address scale effects in fluids and granular slides. |
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Ski jumps are employed downstream of dams to deflect large discharges from floods into the tail water. Dr Heller conducted generic physical model tests involving different types of flip buckets, the main element of ski jumps. |
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Last modified: 24.02.2024 |
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News |
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· October 2021: Watch the YouTube video about our new article A glacier-ocean interaction model for tsunami genesis due to iceberg calving in collaboration with University of Pennsylvania, Zurich and EPFL |
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· September 2015: A new landslide-tsunamis benchmark test case (case 11) is published on the SPHERIC website |
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· September 2013: A short course about landslide generated impulse waves was held at the IAHR World Congress in Chengdu, China, 08.09.2013 |
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Previous news |
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· February 2020: The 2nd edition of the landslide-generated impulse wave manual in collaboration with ETH Zurich has now been released here |
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· February 2019: An open-source article has been published in Scientific Reports (Nature Group) about our HYDRALAB+ funded iceberg-tsunami tests |
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· August 2017: The volume Experimental Hydraulics: Methods, Instrumentation, Data Processing and Management has now been published |
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· April 2023: The new open access article Wave impact on rigid and flexible plates has been published in Coastal Engineering |
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· September 2017: The HYDRALAB+ test campaign Tsunamis due to ice masses was successfully concluded at Deltares, Delft, The Netherlands |
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· January 2024: Dr Heller joined the Advisory Editorial Board of Coastal Engineering (Elsevier) |
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· April 2017: Dr Heller joins the editorial board of the Journal of Marine Science and Engineering |
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· March 2018: The forum article Self-similarity and Reynolds number invariance in Froude modelling attracted two discussions from leading experts |
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· January 2018: Dr Heller joins the editorial board of Landslides, the Journal of the international Consortium on Landslides |
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· December 2021: An article challenging Froude scaling laws for air-water flow has been published in the the Proceeding of the Royal Society A: Numerical validation of novel scaling laws for air entrainment in water |
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· March 2022: Dr Heller gave a keynote lecture about Similitude in Hydraulic Modelling at the 9th International Symposium on Scale Modeling in Napoli; the presentation can be accessed under the Downloads section |
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· March 2023: The new open access article Hydraulic structures – At the heart of 21st century global sustainable development has been published by the IAHR Leadership Committee on Hydraulic Structures in Hydrolink |
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· April 2019: New articles for the special issue Tsunami Science and Engineering II have been published |
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· November 2019: A workshop about landslide generated impulse waves was held at the Swiss Federal Office of Energy in collaboration with ETH Zurich and the Swiss Committee on Dams, Ittigen, Switzerland, 25.11.2019 |
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· July 2021: Dr Heller has been elected to the IAHR Leadership Committee on Hydraulic Structures |
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· June 2023: The new open access article A critical review about generic subaerial landslide-tsunami experiments and options for a needed step change has been published in Earth-Science Reviews |
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· February 2024: Dr Heller joined the EPSRC Peer Review College |
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· February 2024: The new open access article Numerical modelling of tsunami propagation in idealised converging water body geometries has been published in Coastal Engineering |