In 2021, the flood hit the Ahr Valley and killed 135 people. In 2022, a third of the country in Pakistan was flooded. More than 15,000 people lost their lives. The south of Brazil was affected at the beginning of 2024. There, entire city districts sank into the raging floods. Hundreds drowned. Finally, in October, the east of Spain was hit: tens of thousands of buildings were damaged and thousands lost their livelihoods.

Due to climate change, catastrophic floods have become a terrible norm around the world. So it's high time to take the danger seriously and prepare for it.

The hydraulic engineer Peter Oberle has been researching how flood risks can be assessed as realistically as possible at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology for over twenty years. He is convinced that the state government in Baden-Württemberg is taking the danger very seriously. Unfortunately, this is not always the case at the local level.

As part of our research on quality assurance and management in the context of numerical flow modeling, in cooperation with the German Association for Water, Wastewater and Waste (DWA) Working Group WW-1.7, we are currently conducting an international survey.

Further information and the link to the survey can be found on the project page. We invite you to participate in the survey!

At the invitation of EnBW, the winning group of this year's construction competition was able to visit Machine 5 of the Power Plant Iffezheim on Friday, November 15, 2024, which is currently under revision.

The opportunity to see the Kaplan turbine with a runner diameter of 6.8 meters up close, and to hear detailed explanations about the operation and maintenance of the plant, provided them with a profound understanding of the complexity involved in such facilities.

It's not every day that one gets to witness the inner workings of a power plant, and this experience surely left a lasting impact on the students.

On November 6, 2024, a delegation from Tongji University (China) led by the President of the Tongji University Council, Prof. Fang Shouen, accompanied by Dr. Kirsten Hennrich and Mr. Oliver Schmidt from KIT, visited the Theodor Rehbock River Engineering Laboratory for future collaborations in water and environmental sciences.

During the visit, Mário Franca gave a brief introduction of the institute, the laboratory, some of the team's current projects and also our international Master’s programme. Jiangtao Yang presented his research on the physical degradation of wood in rivers.

Mário Franca and colleagues have published a commentary on the role of large debris in amplifying urban flood hazards, focusing on the recent Valencia floods in Spain.

The piece was featured on the blog of the Hydrological Sciences (HS) Division of the European Geosciences Union (EGU).

Read more here: https://blogs.egu.eu/divisions/hs/2024/11/06/floods-valencia-hazardous-debris/

Many end-of-life plastic products, particularly microplastic waste, manage to evade treatment and recovery systems end up in numerous aquatic environments. Urban areas are the main source of microplastic generation and pollution, with particles resulting from the fragmentation of plastic packaging, the abrasion of tyres on roads or shedding from  synthetic clothing on washing machine drums.

The thesis's objective is to investigate the plastic microparticle transport mechanisms in a simplified system representative of a combined storm overflow—a bifurcation flow—using an experimental approach.

Link to the MSc WSE promotion video