Carolyne Bocovich, a PhD student in Underground Construction and Tunneling, recently returned from a semester studying flood defense systems in the Netherlands.
“The Netherlands was an ideal place to collaborate and research flood defense systems,” explained Bocovich, “because 60 percent of their country is at risk of flooding, making flood defense research a high priority.”
Bocovich’s main research seeks to understand backwards erosion and piping as a failure mechanism of earthen dams and levees. While empirical and analytical models already exist to access the probability of backwards erosion leading to failure, most of those models are highly uncertain due to the highly variable soil parameters on which they are based.
“Monitoring techniques are often based on external observations,” said Bocovich, “and those provide little information about how far the internal mechanism of backward erosion has progressed or whether it is continuing. My research is working toward using measured data, such as pore water pressure and geophysical measurements. All of that will lead to less uncertainty as to whether backwards erosion will lead to failure.”
The way researchers in the U.S. and the Netherlands look at failure analysis and risk is slightly different, explained Bocovich. The Netherlands researchers often incorporate more probabilistic techniques than those in the U.S., where the use of factors of safety with deterministic approaches are more common.
“I am so grateful I had the opportunity to study at unique sites in the Netherlands and with the researchers involved in those sites, to attend different courses at Delft University of Technology and attend a conference on geotechnical risk,” said Bocovich.
Bocovich was the recipient of the 2015 Nancy Petry Scholarship from the Institute of International Education Rocky Mountain Center, which helped make her study in the Netherlands possible. Collaboration with the Netherlands was initiated and supported by the Partnership of International Research and Education (PIRE) program from the National Science Foundation, as well as through an invitation and collaboration from the researchers and staff at TU Delft and Deltares. She is pursuing a doctorate in Geotechnical Engineering through the Center for Underground Construction & Tunneling at Mines.
Contact:
Deirdre Keating, Information Specialist College of Engineering and Computational Sciences, Colorado School of Mines | 303-384-2358 | dkeating@mines.edu
Karen Gilbert, Director of Public Relations, Colorado School of Mines | 303-273-3541 | kgilbert@mines.edu