Internships

Internship Project Descriptions

Project 1 Swash Zone Sediment Transport: Lab Experiment: Beaches are dynamic regions of the nearshore where fluid processes lead to constant sand movement. Sand movement is often most apparent in an area called the swash zone where the beach face is intermittently wetted from wave runup. A wave basin study will be conducted to quantify fluid and sediment transport processes for waves arriving at an angle to the shoreline. The summer intern will work with graduate students and international colleagues at the Queen’s University in Canada to collect and analyze data. The student will be trained on the use of a variety of oceanographic and surveying instrumentation.

Project 2 Lidar-derived Beach Morphology: Beaches undergo elevation changes from times scales as small as sub-seconds. However, pronounced changes are observed during extreme events that may be alter the beach shape significantly over just several hours. Our interest is in quantifying the spatial variability in these elevation changes pre- and post-event. The summer intern will work with newly acquired technology including a four-legged robot equipped with a mobile lidar mapping system. The goal of these initial studies is to compare the robot-derived morphology to that from standard surveying techniques.

Project 3 Nearshore Hydrodynamic/Morphodynamic and Application to Scour: The project involves carry out numerical modeling using XBeach beach scale and analyzing OpenFoam simulation results at local structure-scale to understand the interaction between waves, current, sediment transport, soil properties, and structures. The participating scholar may also get involve in planned field experiments at Duck, NC to study nearshore processes and its relationship to soil strength and large wave flume experiments at Oregon State University to study scour around structures planned for 2023.

Apply

Applications must be received no later than March 15, 2023.