IADC Young Author Award 2019 for Ms Cao Lei

The International Association of Dredging Companies (IADC) bestowed the Young Author Award 2019 to Ms Cao Lei, Engineer at the CCCC National Engineering Research Center of Dredging Technology and Equipment in Shanghai, China, last week.

IADC’s Young Author Award is given annually to ‘stimulate the promotion of new ideas and encourage younger men and women in the dredging industry’, said IADC in its release.

The award is granted at industry-leading conferences, with 2019’s winning young author selected from the proceedings of the 22nd World Dredging Congress held Shanghai, China from 22-26 April 2019.

Ms Cao Lei was selected as the Young Author Award winner for the co-authoring of the research paper Numerical Investigation on the Head and Unsteady Flow Characteristics of a Dredge Pump Loading High-Concentration Sands.

According to IADC, this research numerically simulated the unsteady water flow and silt-laden flow in a dredge pump. The paper presented a comparative analysis of the unsteady characteristics of the pump’s performance and the flow field in three typical conditions to expound the influence of sands as well as the relationship between head and flow field.

Results show that high-concentration sands enhance the flow fluctuation and change the head curve slope at part-load conditions which is adverse to operation stability of the pump-pipe combined system.

The Award

The purpose of the IADC’s Young Author Award is to stimulate the promotion of new ideas and encourage younger men and women in the dredging industry, said IADC.

Every year at selected conferences, the IADC recognizes the best paper written by authors younger than 35 years of age.

The Conference Paper Committee recommends a shortlist of qualifying papers that make a significant contribution to the literature on dredging and related fields.

Winning authors receive €1,000 and a trophy of recognition as well as publication of the paper as an article in the IADC’s quarterly journal Terra et Aqua.