New staff member: Burhan Yildiz

News - 21 August 2020 - Webmaster Hydraulic Engineering

Mr Burhan Yildiz has been working as a researcher and lecturer in the area of Hydraulics for more than 14 years. His desire to help people control rivers against disastrous outcomes and make everyone reach clean water triggered his motivation of hydraulics research. He is also a lover of mathematical calculations and mechanics and has pure joy when teaching the subjects to the students.

After graduating from Middle East Technical University, Civil Engineering Department in 2006, Dr Yildiz continued his graduate studies at the Hydraulics Laboratory of the same university. He worked as a research assistant in Hydraulics laboratory at that period where he experienced using several experimental setups and measurement devices. He took part in research and industry projects during his employment at the laboratory. During these projects he led constructions of a 30 m concrete flume and a dam model with its surroundings.

After obtaining his PhD degree in 2014, Dr Yildiz worked as assistant professor at Cyprus International University for four years and at Mugla Sitki Kocman University for the last two years. His research mainly focused on river bed scour, solid-liquid mixture flows and theoretical fluid mechanics.

During his stay at TU Delft he will take a new challenge and work on some River Engineering research topics. Dr Erik Mosselman will be his research mentor during his stay at TU Delft. The study is planned in cooperation with Deltares, so he is also registered there and planning to conduct his office study there until Covid-19 restrictions allow. His research has some aims from theoretical parts to modelling parts and lab study. The first aim in his study is to lead an international initiative of river morphological modeling experts for developing a validation method for morphological models. Besides, he aims to excel in river morphology modelling using Delft3D and will make a morphological model of a highly braided and curved river branch in Bangladesh. He will work in close cooperation with the experts from Deltares for this part. In the third part of his study, he will work on groyne research. For this part, he will work closely with Dr Mohamed Yossef from Deltares for an overview of a groyne research development for the last 15 years and make a summary report on it. Besides, he will be involved in laboratory experiments on groyne resistance by students under the supervision of Dr Jeremy Bricker.

Dr Yildiz knows TU Delft Hydraulic Engineering Department since he started research on Hydraulics as it is one of the best institutes on his subject all around the world. Therefore, he finds himself very lucky to be a part of TU Delft and Deltares, working alongside with the international experts and scientists from river research and hydraulics and would like to use this research opportunity effectively. He looks forward to meeting the colleagues in the Hydraulic Engineering Department and is open for other scientific collaborations with them too.