Dr. Suresh Kumar Thappeta

 

Brief Details:

Dr. Suresh Kumar Thappeta has been serving as an Assistant Professor at VNIT Nagpur since June 2022. He holds over two years of post-doctoral experience from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel, where he gained significant expertise in the study of flash floods at both the field and laboratory scales. Dr. Thappeta completed his Ph.D. in Civil Engineering from IIT Madras in 2019, where he focused on modeling energy loss in mountain stream flows. His doctoral research also included approximately eight months of fieldwork in the Western Ghats near Pune. Dr. Thappeta is proficient in utilizing various instruments such as the ADV, SVR, and ECM, both in fieldwork and laboratory settings. He holds an M.Tech from IIT Guwahati and has authored five Q1 research articles, some of which have been published in prestigious journals such as the Water Resources Research and American Society of Civil Engineers, along with several international conference papers and book chapters. Additionally, he played a key role in securing a 120-lakh FIST project grant for the Civil Engineering Department at VNIT Nagpur.

Research: Bed Shear Stress in Experimental Flash Flood Bores over Dry Beds and over Flowing Water: A Comparison of Methods

Hydraulic parameters including bed shear stress are challenging to calculate for flash floods. Applying theoretical equations to strongly unsteady flows requires comprehensive and accurate flow data that are difficult to collect for natural events. To (i) empirically evaluate the extent to which simpler calculations can reasonably predict shear stresses in rapidly changing hydrographs, and to (ii) determine how bed shear stresses differ for hydraulic bores propagating over dry beds compared to shallow water, we conducted laboratory flume experiments on idealized short-duration flash floods with bores. We compared the Saint-Venant shallow water equation, which theoretically captures the depth-averaged momentum balance of gradually varying unsteady flow, to eight simpler methods with assumptions that are not met in these flows. The Saint-Venant method predicts higher shear stresses immediately after bore arrival, but all of the simpler methods are nonlinearly correlated with the Saint-Venant method even when flow is rapidly changing. While none of the methods we evaluate should strictly apply to rapid changes in depth and velocity of bores, the correlations we find between methods just after bore arrival suggest that, for applications where shear stresses must be calculated but data are insufficient to apply the full Saint-Venant equations, simpler methods may provide meaningful shear stress constraints. 

Teaching: Specific Energy 

The fundamental concept of specific energy (E) will be discussed in detail. Specific energy refers to the total energy when the channel bottom is considered as the reference datum. The equation for specific energy is given by   where  is flow depth, and  is flow velocity. Unlike total head, specific energy may increase or decrease depending on the channel bed level. For a rectangular cross-section, when the flow rate is known, a plot of flow depth versus specific energy is referred to as the specific energy diagram. A detailed discussion will be covered on alternative flow depths, critical depth, and the changes in flow depth during transitions between supercritical and subcritical flow conditions in a channel.

Google Scholar Link:

https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=kETMuYMAAAAJ&hl=en