Dr Fred Sonnenwald
MEng, PhD
Department of Civil and Structural Engineering
Research Associate
+44 114 222 5416
Full contact details
Department of Civil and Structural Engineering
Room D106
Sir Frederick Mappin Building (Broad Lane Building)
Mappin Street
Sheffield
S1 3JD
- Profile
-
Fred Sonnenwald graduated with a MEng in Civil Engineering from the University of Sheffield in 2010.
He stayed on and completed his PhD on "Identifying the residence time distributions of urban drainage structures from solute transport data using maximum entropy deconvolution" in 2014.
Since 2014, Fred has been a researcher here at Sheffield studying fluid dynamics and mixing in urban drainage structures and vegetated flows.
- Research interests
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Fred's research has broadly covered two main subjects. The first, based off his PhD work, is on the identification and interpretation of residence time distributions, or RTDs. An RTD is the distribution of times a particle of water may reside in a system.
It forms a non-parametric model that fully describes the hydraulic/mixing processes occurring without any a-priori assumptions.
Researchers can deconvolve dye tracing data obtained experimentally to obtain an RTD, and use the resulting RTD to gain new insight into the hydrodynamics of the measured system.
This is of particular interest for complex hydraulic structures, such as manholes, where detailed laboratory measurements are infeasible due to the scale and complexity of the structure.
The second area of Fred's research is environmental fluid mechanics. Fred has focused on developing computational fluid dynamics (CFD) based approaches to describing mixing occurring within vegetation and interpreting these models.
He has coupled this with full-scale models of vegetated stormwater ponds to gain new insights into the pond design process and the effectiveness of ponds as constructed treatment devices.
This work will inform future design guidance for vegetated stormwater ponds to ensure consistent treatment.
Fred Sonnenwald's research areas encompass:
- Solute transport and other 1-D modelling (including ADE and ADZ methods)
- Residence time distributions
- Computational modelling & methods (including CFD)
- Deconvolution, as well as other model development and fitting processes
- SuDS: Green roofs, ponds, and other sustainable drainage devices
- Real-time monitoring
- Hydrodynamics
- Manhole mixing and energy losses
- Characterising aquatic vegetation
- Publications
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Journal articles
- Predicting manhole mixing using a compartmental model. Journal of Hydraulic Engineering, 147(12). View this article in WRRO
- Longitudinal dispersion in unsteady pipe flows. Journal of Hydraulic Engineering, 147(9). View this article in WRRO
- Modelling transverse solute mixing across a vegetation generated shear layer. Journal of Hydraulic Research. View this article in WRRO
- A CFD‐Based Mixing Model for Vegetated Flows. Water Resources Research, 55(3), 2322-2347. View this article in WRRO
- A stem spacing‐based non‐dimensional model for predicting
longitudinal dispersion in low‐density emergent vegetation. Acta Geophysica. View this article in WRRO
- Estimating drag coefficient for arrays of rigid cylinders representing emergent vegetation. Journal of Hydraulic Research/De Recherches Hydrauliques. View this article in WRRO
- Computational fluid dynamics modelling of residence times in vegetated stormwater ponds. Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers. Water Management.. View this article in WRRO
- Transverse and longitudinal mixing in real emergent vegetation at low velocities. Water Resources Research, 53(1), 961-978. View this article in WRRO
- Residence Time Distributions for Turbulent, Critical, and Laminar Pipe Flow. Journal of Hydraulic Engineering, 142(9), ---. View this article in WRRO
- Deconvolving Smooth Residence Time Distributions from Raw Solute Transport Data. Journal of Hydrologic Engineering, 20(11), 04015022-04015022. View this article in WRRO
- A two-stage storage routing model for green roof runoff detention. Water Science and Technology, 69(6), 1191-1197. View this article in WRRO
- Configuring Maximum Entropy Deconvolution for the Identification of Residence Time Distributions in Solute Transport Applications. Journal of Hydrologic Engineering, 19(7), 1413-1421. View this article in WRRO
- Quantifying mixing in sewer networks for source localisation. Journal of Environmental Engineering.
- Longitudinal dispersion affected by willow patches of low areal coverage. Hydrological Processes.
- The Impact of Cylinder Diameter Distribution on Longitudinal and Transverse Dispersion within Random Cylinder Arrays. Water Resources Research.
Conference proceedings papers
- A CFD based comparison of mixing due to regular and random cylinder arrays. GeoPlanet: Earth and Planetary Sciences (pp 195-205) View this article in WRRO
- Estimating stem-scale mixing coefficients in low velocity flows. Sustainable Hydraulics in the Era of Global Change, 27 July 2016 - 29 July 2016. View this article in WRRO
- COMPUTATIONAL FLUID DYNAMICS MODELLING OF A VEGETATED STORMWATER POND. 11TH INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM ON ECOHYDRAULICS View this article in WRRO
- Feasibility of the Porous Zone Approach to Modelling Vegetation in CFD (pp 63-75) View this article in WRRO
- Correlation Measures for Solute Transport Model Identification and Evaluation (pp 389-401)
- The influence of outlet angle on solute transport in surcharged manholes. 12th International Conference on Urban Drainage. Porto Alegre/RS, Brazil
- USE OF DRAG COEFFICIENT TO PREDICT DISPERSION COEFFICIENTS IN EMERGENT VEGETATION AT LOW VELOCITIES. ISE2018 View this article in WRRO
Software / Code
Datasets
- Temporal Concentration Profiles in Steady and Unsteady Pipe Flow.
- University of Sheffield Experimental Manhole Traces and CRTDs.
- Transverse and Longitudinal Dispersion in Vegetation 2016: Artificial, Carex, Typha.
- Transverse Dispersion in Vegetation across a Shear-layer 2016: Artificial, Carex, Typha.
- Predicting manhole mixing using a compartmental model. Journal of Hydraulic Engineering, 147(12). View this article in WRRO
- Research group