special sessions

Development of River Management Technology Using River Survey and Monitoring Drones

Convener: Dong Sop Rhee (Korea Institute of Civil Engineering and Building Technology)

Description: Recent rapid progress in the affordable production of drone and UAV technology have shown that the drone platform can be an effective tool for river survey and monitoring applications. The drones can have RGB or hyperspectral cameras and LiDAR equipment installed to acquire high-resolution data from the river and banks. The drone platform can also include pre/post processing software to handle the acquired data. This will enable the users to produce three-dimensional point data that could be used for real time simulations. To introduce these recent developments, this special session will focus on sharing the latest technology and research results by researchers working as a group with topics such as remote sensing, drone platform development, water depth measurement by LiDAR, and hyperspectral imaging processing for water quality data. In addition, field experiment research and data analysis using data based models will be presented.

Rainwater harvesting and utilization

Convener: Mooyoung Han (Seoul National University)

Description: Harvesting of rainwater and its utilization as a water resource represents a sustainable solution to deal with the water issues in regions under high water stress. It has been demonstrated that with proper design and operation of an array of simple treatment units, harvested rainwater can be obtained at drinking water quality. Thanks to easy accessibility of rainwater and the compatibility of rainwater harvesting and utilization systems to small communities in the developing world, rainwater harvesting and utilization is expected to serve as one of the effectives solutions to the UN SDG6 of “clean water and sanitation”. The topic of rainwater harvesting and utilization systems will be discussed in this special session, including those that address water quality and quantity issues, advancements in design and operation principles, and field experiences involved in the systems.

Hydro-environment in cities – water cycle, metabolism, and management

Convener: Yongju Choi (Seoul National University)

Description: According to the rapid urbanization in the globe, water balance within a city is receiving growing attention among the scientific communities of hydrology and environmental engineering. Various strategies of water-related urban design, integrated urban water management, urban water flow analysis, and nature-based solutions have been proposed in different regions of the world. Although these strategies are all aimed at achieving sustainable urban water balance, communications among researchers with different backgrounds are largely lacking up to date. This session is organized to facilitate communications among researchers who use different “languages” with regard to hydro-environment in cities; identify knowledge gaps that may be filled via interdisciplinary works; and exchange different perspectives on water in cities.

Technical Strategy for Quality Control of Hydrological Data and Advanced Toolkits for IWRM

Convener: Joonwoo Noh (K-water)

Description: In general, observed hydrological data are not sufficient to design and evaluate water resources fields in a watershed. For this reason, hydraulic and hydrologic models are commonly utilized to achieve these purposes and even self-developed models (or software packages) are used more popular than commercial ones to reflect the localized geomorphological, hydro-meteorological and land use / land cover characteristics. Recently, a digital twin concept has been popularly applied to simulate hydraulic and hydrologic phenomena in order to predict and manage water resources comprehensively as an integrated standard platform or a system. However, no matter what models and digital twin technologies are applied, the observations and accuracy of data being used for models or digital twin technologies are the key drivers. This session will address the importance of reliability on hydrological data, and introduce methodologies and technologies for quality control, self-developed (or commercial) hydraulic and hydrologic models and digital twin concepts to design and evaluate water resources fields in a watershed.

Green Energy & ICT of Clean Water

Convener: Jong Min Choi (Hanbat National University)

Description: Efforts to respond to climate change and reduction of greenhouse gas emissions are spreading around the world. Thus, the importance of the renewable energy such as hydro power, photovoltaic, P2G, wind power, etc., is increasing. Hydroelectric power generation, the traditional renewable energy from the potential energy of water has been undergoing steady research and development. In recent years, R&D on element technology for renewable energy and its application such as floating PV and hydrothermal energy have been gaining attention. Furthermore, ICT enabling efficient management of the resources mentioned, is also important. This special session is organized to share the most recent experiences by K-water related to the hydrothermal energy applied for internet data center, development of hydro turbine, floating PV plant and AI-based composite sensor for water purification plant.

Smart Safety Management of River Facilities

Convener: Jongwook Lee (K-water)

Description: The need for SOC (Social Overhead Capital) facilities safety management is increasing due to increased rainfall uncertainty, flood risk and vulnerability by climate change. In the case of hydraulic structures such as dam and river weir, deterioration trends to be higher compared to other SOC facilities. This special session was organized to share the research results on the identification of measurement outliers and structural safety analysis by AI and machine learning measurement data, evaluation of the condition and behavior of underwater structures by underwater ROV, and the development of a digital twin-based safety management platform.