Profilo personale: Francesco De Vanna

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Research Profile

I am a Tenure-Track Assistant Professor in the Department of Industrial Engineering at the University of Padova, holding the National Scientific Habilitation as Associate Professor in Aerospace Engineering (ASN 09/A1). My research focuses on high-fidelity computational fluid dynamics for aerospace propulsion, with particular emphasis on large-eddy simulation of compressible wall-bounded flows, gas turbine aerothermodynamics, and super/hypersonic boundary layers.

I am the principal developer of URANOS — an open-source, GPU-accelerated compressible Navier–Stokes solver for pre-exascale HPC systems, available at github.com/uranos-gpu/uranos-gpu. My work has produced over 50 peer-reviewed journal articles and has been supported by competitive grants from CINECA, EuroHPC JU, and European Horizon programmes.

Research keywords: DNS · LES · WMLES · compressible turbulence · shock-capturing schemes · gas turbine aerothermodynamics · hypersonic boundary layers · HPC · GPU

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Teaching

2026 – present — Aircraft Propulsion (M.Sc. Aerospace Engineering)

2020 – present — Introduction to Numerical Methods for Unsteady Gas Dynamics (Ph.D. School)

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Past Teaching Activities

2023 – 2025 — Machines Fluid Dynamics (B.Sc. Mechanical Engineering)

2022 – 2025 — Advanced Optimization Method for Machine Thermofluidynamics (M.Sc. Mechanical Engineering)

2019 – 2022 — Laboratory of Computational Fluidynamics (M.Sc. Aerospace Engineering)

 

Open Thesis Proposals

Thesis activities are conducted within my research group using URANOS and are eligible for continuation as Ph.D. projects. Proposals marked industry may involve external partners depending on timing and availability.

[01 — M.Sc./Ph.D.] High-Fidelity Wall-Resolved and Wall-Modeled LES of Turbulent Compressible Flows Scale-resolving simulations of wall-bounded flows at aeronautically relevant Reynolds and Mach numbers, with focus on turbulence statistics, near-wall physics, and validation against DNS reference data.

[02 — M.Sc./Ph.D.] DNS and WRLES of Cooled Surfaces in Compressible Turbulent Regimes High-fidelity investigation of wall-cooling effects on turbulence dynamics, heat transfer, and entropy generation, targeting configurations representative of gas turbine film cooling.

[03 — M.Sc./Ph.D.] Numerical Methods for Real and Thermally-Perfect Gases Development and assessment of high-order schemes within URANOS for flows with non-ideal thermodynamic behaviour, relevant to high-enthalpy and combustion-product environments.

[04 — M.Sc./Ph.D.] Film Cooling Aerothermodynamics in Transonic and Supersonic Regimes Computational study of cooling jet–mainstream interactions in turbine and nozzle geometries, combining LES with immersed boundary techniques to characterise thermal protection effectiveness.

[05 — M.Sc.] Surrogate-Based Optimisation of Aeroengine Components Construction of CFD-informed surrogate models (Gaussian process or neural network) over parametric geometry spaces, coupled with gradient-free optimisation algorithms to minimise aerodynamic losses in turbine or nozzle configurations.

[06 — M.Sc.] Numerical Uncertainty Quantification in RANS Turbomachinery Simulations Mesh sensitivity analysis, Richardson extrapolation, and turbulence-model sensitivity studies for canonical propulsion test cases, aimed at establishing best-practice guidelines for industrial and educational CFD workflows.

[07 — M.Sc.] Industry-Sponsored Topic (availability depends on active collaborations) Thesis developed in partnership with an industrial or institutional partner on a mutually agreed propulsion or fluid dynamics topic. Contact me directly for current availability.

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Contact

Email: francesco.devanna@unipd.it ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-6627-5451 GitHub: github.com/uranos-gpu/uranos-gpu Address: Department of Industrial Engineering, Via Venezia 1, 35131 Padova, Italy