About Herman Kernkamp

Herman Kernkamp was trained as maritime engineer at the TU-Delft and performed his masters thesis in 1988 at Delft Hydraulics (Deltares) on the subject of numerical modelling of harbour seiches. His first project at Delft Hydraulics was development of a numerical model of the Rotterdam port, later to be used for investigating the effects of the surge barrier ‘Maeslantkering’ on seiches. In order to accurately capture the harbour outlines, a curvilinear grid was made. Generating such a grid was a cumbersome task and he developed an interactive orthogonal grid generation program RGFGRID, that is still applied today by many users of our well known hydrodynamics program Delft3D.

Equally important for hydrodynamic modelling is the accurate representation of the bathymetry in the numerical model. He developed a program especially tuned for this task called QUICKIN, also used widely today. After several years of projects involving hydrodynamical modelling in 2D and 3D, at home and abroad, he developed jointly with Prof. Stelling of TU-Delft the program Delft-FLS, a 2D hydrodynamics code especially suited for overland flows and flooding studies. The functionality of this program was later imported into Sobek-1D2D, that was maintained and developed further by Mr. Kernkamp from 2004 on.

In 2007 he started with Prof. Stelling the development of our next generation hydrodynamics system called D-Flow FM, or briefly DFM. The aim of this modelling system is to incorporate 1D, 2D and 3D functionality in one system, based upon the accurate and robust numerical schemes for which Sobek 1D2D and Delft3D are famous. Also, we aim at more flexibility in setting up models by application of a unstructured mesh system, that allows for triangles, quadrilaterals, pentagons, hexagons and 1D cells.