Unibo Principal Investigator: Prof. Antonio Barletta Dept. of
Industrial Engineering - DIN
Brazilian Principal Investigator: Prof. Leonardo Santos de Brito Alves Dept. of Mechanical Engineering, Universidade Federal Fluminense UFF
The topic of the joint research program is the use of the generalized integral transforms method for the numerical simulation of hydrodynamic instability. A special focus is placed on the role of the viscous dissipation effect for Newtonian and non-Newtonian fluid saturated porous media.
Both viscous dissipation and non-Newtonian behavior are
physical effects of special interest when dealing with organic fluids, such as biological liquids found in deep sea water oil reservoirs that are common in Brazil. Another very important application is in the field of the ground-coupled heat pumps, where the soil surrounding the buried pipes is modeled as a porous medium saturated by water.
Other applications include the dispersion of liquid pollutants in the soil and the thermal treatment of liquids for the food industry.
Hence, there is a wide engineering interest in the stability of
flows in porous media. The research program is developed to the instability of viscoelastic fluids induced by viscous dissipation. This topic is quite innovative, as most of the existing studies on the instability in viscoelastic fluids are relative to the classical Rayleigh-Bénard setup, where the effect of viscous dissipation is not taken into account.
The numerical investigation of the hydrodynamic instability is a complicated task, that can be tackled with the generalized integral transform method, a hybrid numerical-analytical technique for the solution of boundary value problems and eigenvalue problems, that was brought to a high level of efficiency and accuracy by the wide and insightful work started by Prof. Renato Cotta at Universidade Federal of Rio De Janeiro (UFRJ), and developed in collaboration with Prof. Leonardo Alves (UFF) and Prof. Leandro Alcoforado Sphaier (UFF).
The FIBRA project is oriented with all the aspects related to the modeling of convection in Newtonian and non-Newtonian fluid saturated porous media, while the FARB project is devoted to the application of these findings to the optimal design of ground-coupled heat pumps.
ALMA MATER STUDIORUM-UNIVERSITA DI BOLOGNA
- Prof. Antonio Barletta, DIN
- Prof. Enzo Zanchini, DIN
- Prof. Sandro Manservisi, DIN
- Prof. Ruben Scardovelli, DIN
- Dr. Luca Barbaresi, DIN
- Dr. Stefano Lazzari, DIN
- Dr. Eugenia Rossi di Schio, DIN
BRAZIL
- Prof. Leonardo Santos de Brito Alves, UFF
- Prof. Leandro Alcoforado Sphaier, UFF
- Prof. Renato Machado Cotta, UFRJ