Turbulent mixing in environmental flows

Turbulent mixing in environmental flows

The university path was: a Bachelor degree in Environmental Engineering and a Master degree in Environmental Engineering with a focus on Climate Change Adaptation and Mitigation Measures. The project of the master thesis has been on turbulent mixing of stratified fluxes over rough surfaces studied through a laboratory experiment called lock-exchange. The study had the aim of enriching the knowledge of some of the parametric laws involved in the closure of the turbulence in stable stratified conditions trough a laboratory analysis of gravity currents flowing over rough surfaces, that represented for example urban canopies. The obtained results showed how important is the choice of the different parameters on the accuracy and predictive capabilities of Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) models in simulating gravity currents.
This represented the starting point of the research project that has started to be conducted during the PhD.

To enrich the knoledge on urban heat island through laboratory experiments and simulation with the Weather Research and Forecasting Model and try to find mitigation measures.

The Lock-Exchange laboratory experiment and numerical experiments using the Weather Research & Forecasting (WRF) model