Rodrigo Cienfuegos

Hydraulic and Environmental Engineering Department, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile

Professor Cienfuegos is a civil engineer from the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, and PhD from the Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Hydraulique et Mécanique de Grenoble in France. He is currently an associate professor at the School of Engineering of the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, where he has been in charge of undergraduate and graduate courses in fluid mechanics, hydraulics, sediment transport and coastal engineering since 2006.

His research focuses on nearshore hydrodynamics and morphodynamics, numerical and experimental modelling of shallow water flows for coastal and riverine applications and he has developed innovative numerical methods for nonlinear shallow water equations and Boussinesq-type equations. He is currently in charge of a large joint research effort of Chile and Japan on tsunami mitigation, funded by JICA and JST (Satreps project “Enhancement of technology to develop tsunami-resilient community”), and he leads a Fondef project intended to assess marine energy resources in the Chacao Channel in Chile.

Prof. Cienfuegos is the Deputy Director of the recently awarded National Center for Interdisciplinary Research on Natural Disaster Management, funded by the FONDAP program in Chile.

Sample publications

  • R. Almar, R. Cienfuegos, P.A. Catalan, H. Michallet, B. Castelle, P. Bonneton and V. Marieu. A new breaking wave height direct estimator from video imagery. Journal of Coastal Engineering, 61: 42–48, 2012 doi:10.1016/j.coastaleng.2011.12.004
  • H. Michallet, R. Cienfuegos, E. Barthélemy, and F. Grasso. Kinematics of waves propagating and breaking on a barred beach. European Journal of Mechanics B/Fluids, 30(6): 624–634, 2011 doi:10.1016/j.euromechflu.2010.12.004
  • R. Cienfuegos, E. Barthélemy, and P. Bonneton. A wave-breaking model for Boussinesq-type equations including roller effects in the mass conservation equation. Journal of Waterway, Port, Coastal, and Ocean Engineering, 136, 1, 10–26. 2009 doi:10.1061/(ASCE)WW.1943-5460.0000022
  • R. Cienfuegos, E. Barthélemy, and P. Bonneton. A fourth-order compact finite volume scheme for fully nonlinear and weakly dispersive Boussinesq-type equations. Part I: Model development and analysis. International Journal for Numerical Methods in Fluids, 51:1217–1253. 2006 doi:10.1002/fld.1141 — full-text