General info

From concentrated solar power plants to rocket engines, energy conversion systems are continually re-engineered to perform ever better. Often this involves fluids being pushed into the supercritical region, where highly non-ideal thermodynamic effects are at play. Yet, our fundamental understanding of flow physics at such conditions lags behind to successfully realize these exciting engineering applications. Hence, our research focuses on fluid mechanics and turbulence research with non-ideal fluids. In particular, we study: supercritical fluid turbulence, turbulence-radiation interactions in optically thick fluids, turbulence modeling for compressible flows, unsteady effects in transonic flows for engineering applications.

Overview of fundamental studies we currently do and we will perform in the future.

Highlights

ERC consolidator grant
My ERC grant will allow me to perform the first study of its kind, combining advanced hydrodynamic stability analysis, novel simulation tools, and original experiments to identify and characterize new flow physics of supercritical fluids.
Focus On Fluids, Journal of Fluid Mechanics
Our work on flow stability with supercritical fluids has been discussed in Instabilities in non-ideal fluids, by J.-C. Robinet and X. Gloerfelt
Visting professor in Japan
In 2019 I received funding (JSPS) for a visting professor position in Japan from July - August 2019 in the group of Prof. Soshi Kawai.
Teaching CFD interactively
I wrote a simple and fast incompressible Navier-Stokes solver for teaching CFD interactively. Click here to see more.
Poster prize
Gustavo won 1st place at the Delft Energy Initiative poster presentation in 2017. Click here to view the poster.
Cum laude PhD degree for Ashish
Ashish graduated cum laude in June 2017. In addition, he won young scientist award for the best oral presentation at the Burgers symposium and was among the five finalists of the ERCOFTAC 'da Vinci Competition'. Congratulations!
Cover, Journal of Fluid Mechanics
Jurriaan's JFM paper made it on the cover of Journal of Fluid Mechanics, volume 799.
Cover, Journal of Fluid Mechanics
Hassan's JFM paper made it on the cover of Journal of Fluid Mechanics, volume 800.

Representative publications

2019
  • Silvestri et al., Modeling turbulence-radiation interactions, J. Quant. Spect. & Rad. Transf.
  • Ren et al., Linear instability of Poiseuille flows with supercritical CO2, J. Fluid Mechanics
  • Ren et al., Boundary-layer stability in supercritical fluids, J. Fluid Mechanics
  • Silvestri & Pecnik, GPU based radiative transfer solver, Journal Computational Physics
  • Anand et al., Supersonic Radial Vanes in Nonideal Fluids, J. of Eng. for Gas Turb. & Power

    • 2018
  • Otero R. et al., Turbulence modelling var. properties, python, Int. J. of Heat & Fluid Flow
  • Mehrali et al., Full-spectrum solar thermal conversion with nanofluids, Applied energy
  • Silvestri et al., Turbulence radiation interaction various optical depths, J. Fluid Mechanics

    • 2017
  • Sengupta et al., Compressible supercritical fl. turbulence, Flow Turbulence & Combustion
  • Rinaldi et al., Linear stab. of buffer layer streaks in var. prop. flows, Physical Review Fluids
  • Patel et al., Scalar statistics in var. prop. turbulent channel flows, Physical Review Fluids
  • Pecnik & Patel, Scaling & modeling of variable property flows, J. Fluid Mechanics
  • Peeters, Turbulent heat transfer in an annulus at supercrit. press., Physical Review Fluids

    • 2016
  • Rinaldi et al., Unsteady operation of a highly supersonic ORC turbine, J. Turbomachinery
  • Nemati et al., Heat transfer to fluids at supercrit. press., effect of BCs, J. Fluid Mechanics
  • Peeters et al., Turbulence attenuation in flows at supercrit. press., J. Fluid Mechanics
  • Patel et al., Influence of density and viscosity gradients on turbulence, J. Fluid Mechanics


    • CFD wiki

  • Our internal website related to HPC clusters and non-public software.