Vittorio Di Federico

0) Bachelor Thesis in Hydraulics: several topics in fluid mechanics, environmental hydraulics and subsurface hydrology are available. Topics at present available are: a) fluow and transport in porous and fractured media; b) environmental gravity currents; c) failures in water distribution and sewer networks; d) neural networks and expert systems applied to the analysis of laboratory experiments.

1) Master's Thesis in Idraulica ambientale, Groundwater Flow and Transport Processes, Uncertainty and Risk in Hydraulic Systems: Flow of Newtonian and non-Newtonian fluids in subsurface fractured media

• Flow modeling of water and rheologically complex fluids in single fractures or fracture networks for environmental protection and remediation, hydraulic fracturing, subsurface fluids exploitation, solving the inverse problem to determine medium properties.
  

2) Master's Thesis in Idraulica ambientale, Groundwater Flow and Transport Processes, Uncertainty and Risk in Hydraulic Systems: Propagation of gravity currents in porous media

• Modeling of current behaviour for industrial applications (geological storage of carbon dioxide in deep geological formations or hydrocarbon reservoirs, displacement in oil and gas reservoirs) and environmental applications (pollutant dispersion in the subsurface, propagation of saltwater wedges in coastal aquifers).
  

3) Master's Thesis in Idraulica ambientale, Groundwater Flow and Transport Processes, Uncertainty and Risk in Hydraulic Systems: Propagation of free-surface viscous gravity currents

• Modeling of current behavior for industrial applications (glass fabrication, rheometers for determination of fluid properties, spills following industrial accidents) and environmental applications (turbidity currents on the seafloor, debis flows, lava currents, ice sheets modeling, gravity currents in fractures and faults).

4) Master's Thesis in Idraulica ambientale, Groundwater Flow and Transport Processes, Uncertainty and Risk in Hydraulic Systems: Modeling of flow and transport in multiscale heterogeneous porous media with stochastic techiniques

• Hydrogeologic medium properties have a random spatial variability, and corresponding flow (hydraulic head, fluid flux and velocity) and transport (solute concentration, solute flux and velocity) variables have a stochastic nature. Different modeling techinques (analytical, numerical via Monte Carlo simulations) allow determining practical quantities of interest for subsurface flow and transport: effective conductivity, dispersion of a solute plume, determination of capture zones,variability of effective properties with scale.

5) Master's Thesis in Idraulica ambientale, Groundwater Flow and Transport Processes, Uncertainty and Risk in Hydraulic Systems: Environmental risk evaluation via Fault Tree Analysis

• Undesidered events in environmental transport and flow modeling (e.g. water level or pollutant concentration threshold reached at a given point in space-time) are represented as Top Events in a Fault Tree. The probability of happening of the Top Event has important practical implications for environmentally-oriented engineering design and monitoring, and needs to be evaluated by means of the probability of single events contributing to the Top Event. This can be done with different modeling tools or expert judgment for several environmental and engineering systems of practical relevance: water distribution systems, sewer systems, aquifers used for drinking water supply, subsurface reservoirs for CO2 storage.  

6) Master's Thesis in Idraulica ambientale, Groundwater Flow and Transport Processes, Uncertainty and Risk in Hydraulic Systems: Groundwater and Climate Change: analysis of main factors involved.