Professor Ian Guymer

PhD

Department of Civil and Structural Engineering

Professor of Civil Engineering

CIV Ian Guymer
Profile picture of CIV Ian Guymer
i.guymer@Sheffield.ac.uk
+44 114 222 5740
Room MezC3, Sir Frederick Mappin Building (Broad Lane Building)

Full contact details

Professor Ian Guymer
Department of Civil and Structural Engineering
Room MezC3
Sir Frederick Mappin Building (Broad Lane Building)
Mappin Street
Sheffield
S1 3JD
Profile

My research helps manage the water environment, by describing how pollutants mix in water.

Professor Ian Guymer

Ian graduated in 1981 from Loughborough University of Technology in Civil Engineering. He did his PhD at the University of Birmingham, graduating in 1985, on aspects of solute mixing processes in well-mixed estuaries.

His first academic appointment was as at Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, followed by an appointment to the lecturing staff within our Department in 1990, where, alongside Professor Adrian Saul, he helped to set up our postgraduate Water MSc courses and the Water research group.

In January 2005, he was appointed Professor of Civil Engineering at the University of Warwick. He returned to Sheffield in 2018 with EPSRC Established Career Fellowship funding. Ian is Sheffield born and bred and for the majority of his life, has lived in his home city.

Research interests

Ian's research interests centre around the mixing and transport of contaminants and pollutants in coastal and estuarine areas, rivers, urban drainage and most recently, pipe distribution systems. His work aims to identify and quantify the transport and mixing processes within areas of civil engineering hydraulics.

This is achieved by conducting laboratory and field studies, then developing simplified modelling procedures for engineering applications.

Research projects have investigated the mixing processes in urban drainage and treatment systems, looking at specific components, such as manholes and combined sewer overflow structures, wetlands and ponds, river systems, quantifying dispersion effects due to topographic variations, estuarine studies and coastal mixing processes. These topics are particularly important for modelling water quality processes.

He has been funded to undertake research studies on UK national hydraulic facilities, the Flood Channel and the Coastal Research Facility, formerly situated at HR Ltd., Wallingford and major European research laboratory facilities at DHI and Delft.

In recent years, fundamental research has been funded by EPSRC, NERC, and the EU, with applied research funded by Unilever, Water utilities, the Environment Agency and Highways England (formerly the Highways Agency).

Publications

Journal articles

Chapters

Conference proceedings papers

Software / Code

Datasets

Preprints

Research group

SuDS (Sustainable Drainage Systems) and Urban Drainage

Water Distribution Systems and Infrastructure

Environmental Fluid Mechanics

Catchments and River Engineering

Grants

Modelling Mixing Mechanisms in 1D Water Network Models

Predicting the effects of management strategies requires knowledge of the hydrodynamic processes covering spatial scales of a few millimetres (turbulence) to several hundred kilometres (catchments), with a similarly large range of timescales from milliseconds to weeks.

View all research projects

Professional activities and memberships

Ian is a Chartered Engineer and a Member of the Chartered Institution of Water and Environmental Management. Ian is currently the Academic-in-Residence for the Institution of Civil Engineers' Shaping the World initiative.

Shaping the World uses the knowledge and experience of civil engineers to help find solutions to some of the world’s most pressing problems.

Potential PhD offerings

Mixing in Engineered Water Systems – Relating Dispersion to Energy Loss

This project will investigate the effect of changes in cross-sectional shape and unsteady flows on the longitudinal mixing in 1D engineered water systems. It will aim to relate the mechanisms of energy loss to mixing to improve current predictive numerical models of engineered systems.

Solute Mixing in Patchy Vegetated Flows

This proposal aims to extend knowledge by investigating patchy vegetation, looking at discrete patches within a flow and different stem or plant densities within a patch. These will be quantified in a new laboratory facility at the University of Sheffield which will provide unique information on integrating multi-scale processes, quantifying mixing and evaluating appropriate computational fluid dynamics (CFD) tools to enable water engineers and environmental managers to predict water quality changes.

If you're interested in one of these projects, or would like to self-propose a project, please contact Ian at the above email. Current PhD opportunities in the department can be viewed here.

Links

Mixing Studies  Residence Times in Vegetated Stormwater Ponds  Water Engineering Discipline