Skip to main content

Flood control strategies for 21st Century cities: optimal control of weir & reservoir levels to save Yorkshire towns from flooding

Academic lead
Onno Bokhove (School of Mathematics)
Industrial lead
Simon Byrne, Environment Agency
Co-supervisor(s)
Mark Trigg (School of Civil Engineering), Tom Willis, Lindsay McMillan, Simon Kerr, Mott MacDonald
Project themes
Environmental Flows, Geophysical flows, Particulate flows, sediments & rheology

We propose an exciting PhD opportunity to develop the research foundation for this PhD to make sure all objectives can be achieved. The PhD project comprises the following main research objectives and tasks:

- The final objective is the creation of a professional guidance document on flood control for the two industrial partners, Mott MacDonald and the Environment Agency, regarding both weir and reservoir control, exemplified for the Aire River concerning Leeds, and the Calder River concerning Mytholmroyd and Hebden Bridge.

- The study and further development of Model Predictive Control (MPC, Breckpot 2013 [2]) for flood control and drinking water supply, through experimental, computational and mathematical modelling.

- The translation of the real-world demands into a conceptual, idealised model, with associated computational realisations to be tested in an actual laboratory environment, e.g. the table-top flood demonstrator Wetropolis [4].

- The transfer of the MPC techniques for flood control back from the idealised, conceptual testing environment into the real-world cases, in the form of a professional guidance document.

Fig. 1. Analysis of Boxing Day flood data at Armley, Leeds, UK: a) Aire River level data (indicated 3.9m level), b) corresponding discharge using bespoke rating curve, c) excess flood volume over the threshold flood level chosen (so for the indicated threshold of 3.9m it is the area above the dashed line and below the solid line in b) and d) same but expressed as a square lake of 2-m depth. Courtesy raw data: EA/Leeds.


Fig. 2. Analysis of Boxing Day flood data at Mytholmroyd: UK: a) Calder River level data (indicated 4.5m level), b) corresponding discharge using bespoke rating curve, c) excess flood volume over the threshold flood level chosen and d) same but expressed as a square lake of 1-m depth. Courtesy raw data: EA/Leeds.