Head:
Address:
Karlsruhe Institute for Technology (KIT)
Institute for Water and Environment
- Hydraulic Engineering and Water Resources Management -
Kaiserstrasse 12
76131 Karlsruhe
Phone: +49 (0)721 - 608-44418
Email: wasserbau∂iwu.kit.edu
Visiting address:
The challenges facing water managers and engineers nowadays are manifold, complex, and require cross disciplinary approaches. These challenges include the safety of hydraulic natural and built systems, ageing infrastructures, pollution, guarantee of energy and food security, sustainable development and safety of urban environment, ecological feedbacks and an uncertain future.
Our group develops research towards engineering solutions for the design, the planning and the implementation of sustainable water infrastructures prepared for global change. We investigate the mechanics of flowing water and its interaction with key elements of a river basin such as sediments, dissolved matter, gases, living organisms and people. More specifically, the group is committed to develop research on four main topics: sustainable and secure water for supply, food and energy; adaptive and multi-functional hydraulic systems; healthy rivers; and geophysical processes in rivers and lakes.
On 12–13 June, Dr. Jiangtao Yang presented his experimental research on the physical degradation of large wood in rivers at GESINUS 2025, held at Universität der Bundeswehr München, Munich.
In his presentation, he demonstrated possible wood debarking patterns under varying conditions such as flow velocity and water depth, and discussed how these parameters influence the debarking rate.
During the seminar, it was also a great opportunity to visit the hydraulic laboratory at Universität der Bundeswehr München and learn about their ongoing research on the deposition mechanisms of debris flows and soil seepage processes under freeze–thaw cycles.
The SimHydro Conference 2025 took place from June 2nd to 4th on the Sophia Tech campus of the Université Côte d'Azur. It addressed the question "Which data for water and models?".
Fabian Knepper represented IWU-WB and gave an oral presentation on the results and conclusions from the international survey on the state of QA/QM in flow modeling conducted by the IWU-WB.
In the first week of June, we had the pleasure of welcoming a delegation from the University of Waterloo (Canada) to our Institute.
This visit was part of an ongoing exchange, following our trip to Waterloo in spring 2024. The visit provided an excellent opportunity to showcase KIT-IWU’s research activities and infrastructures to our Canadian colleagues, to further strengthen the long-standing collaboration between our universities, and to reinforce the connection between Baden-Württemberg and Ontario. Most importantly, it served as a platform to lay the groundwork for exciting new partnerships in the water sector. We sincerely thank the KIT International Office for their valuable support and look forward to the next steps in this promising collaboration!
In the last three decades, scientists have questioned the efficiency of fishways as a tool to restore riverine connectivity for migratory fish populations globally and devoted efforts to discuss frameworks for future fish passage management and research. In this talk,
I aim to discuss several factors that can influence the quantification of attraction efficiency, including challenges correlating hydraulic and fish metrics (e.g. attraction flow and fish movement), potential bias in experimental design, and limitations of methods used.
Link to the seminar PDF file
We are pleased to announce that Mario Franca has been appointed Fellow of the International Association for Hydro-Environment Engineering and Research (IAHR, https://www.iahr.org/) by the IAHR Council.
The IAHR Fellow Membership aims to recognize members for their outstanding contributions to hydro-environment engineering and research, as well as to the development of IAHR.
On 17th May, the KIT Open Doors Day, in a special year in which we celebrate our 200th anniversary, was a great success with over 23,000 visitors.
Our institute was present, and all our staff contributed actively to a great day of exchange with community members. From 10 am to 7 pm, we received numerous visitors at both our exhibition locations: a tent at Otto-Ammann Platz and the Theodor Rehbock Hydraulics Laboratory. It was a pleasure to welcome so many members of the public, colleagues, press, personalities, politicians, and, most importantly, children who greatly enjoyed their time with our activities, including paper boat races, plastic detection, and river morphology experiments.
Special thanks to the community for visiting our laboratories and exhibition tent! This day was made for you, and we hope everyone enjoyed it and learned more about the relevance of our work to society!
