The International Association of Dredging Companies presented its Best Paper Award for a Young Author at the PIANC COPEDEC held at the IIT Madras, Chennai, India, on February 24, 2012, to Darshana T. Dassanayake for his paper, “Important Engineering Properties of Geotextile Sand Containers and their Effect on the Hydraulic Stability of GSC Structures”.
Mr. Dassanayake, who is originally from Sri Lanka and received his Masters from UNESCO-IHE, is presently a Research Associate and PhD candidate at Leichtweiss-Institut, Technische Universität Braunschweig, Germany. His paper addresses the increasing use of Geotextile Sand Containers (GSCs) and the lack of proper guidelines available for the design of GSC structures based on sound scientific data. To remedy this, Mr. Dassanayake and his colleagues at Technical University Braunschweig, under the supervision of Prof. Dr.-Ing. Hocine Oumeraci, have been conducting a series of experimental investigations and using numerical modelling to better understand the effect of GSCs on hydraulic stability and to develop a computational tool and simple formulae to determine this.
The PIANC COPEDEC Conference was characterised by a great number of technical research papers by young engineering professionals, which made the selection of an award winner quite competitive. The winner was chosen with the assistance of the Paper Selection Committee headed by Prof. Kees d’Angremond (the Netherlands), Prof. C. Pattiaratchi (Australia), Dr. Gary Mocke (South Africa), Prof. Ron Cox (Australia), Prof. Soren Kohlhase (Germany), Prof. Tomoya Shibayama (Japan) and Professors V. Sundar and S.A. Sannasiraj (both of India). Both the paper itself and the presentation were part of the qualifying criteria.
The Award
Each year at selected conferences, the International Association of Dredging Companies grants awards for the best papers written by authors younger than 35 years of age. In each case the Conference Paper Committee is asked to recommend a prize-winner whose paper makes a significant contribution to the literature on dredging and related fields. The purpose of the IADC Award is “to stimulate the promotion of new ideas and encourage younger men and women in the dredging industry”. The winner of an IADC Award receives €1000 and a certificate of recognition and the paper may then be published in Terra et Aqua.
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Dredging Today Staff, March 15, 2012; Image: IADC