Personal profile: Francesco De Vanna

Francesco De Vanna

Assistant Professor

Department of Industrial Engineering – University of Padova

Profile

Working in propulsion and applied fluid dynamics, I am an Assistant Professor at the University of Padova.

My expertise lies in compressible flows, where I employ advanced methodologies such as Large-Eddy Simulation (LES), Wall-Modeled LES (WMLES), and optimization techniques for the design of efficient engineering devices in the field of aerospace. Main developer of URANOS, an open-source GPU-accelerated Navier–Stokes solver for high-fidelity simulations of compressible flows.

Current Teaching

• 2026 - present | Aircraft Propulsion (M.Sc. Aeronautical Engineering, UniPD)
• 2023 – present | Professor – Machines Fluid Dynamics (B.Sc. Mechanical Engineering, UniPD)

• 2020 – present | Professor – Introduction to Numerical Methods for Unsteady Gas Dynamics (Ph.D. Industrial Engineering, UniPD)

Previous Positions

• 2022 – 2026 | Professor – Advanced Methods for Optimization of Machine Thermofluidynamics (M.Sc. Mechanical Engineering, UniPD)

• 2020 – 2022 | Adjunct Professor – Laboratory of Computational Fluid Dynamics (M.Sc. Aerospace Engineering, UniPD)

• 2020 – 2023 | Post-doctoral Fellow – Machines Fluid Dynamics, Department of Industrial Engineering, UniPD

• 2018 | Visiting Ph.D. – ENSMA Poitiers (FR), research on super/hypersonic flows

• 2016 – 2019 | Ph.D. in Computational Fluid Dynamics – Dissertation: “A high-resolution fully compressible Navier–Stokes solver for analysis of moving objects at high Mach numbers”

Research Topics

• Gas dynamics applied to aerospace devices analysis

• Large-Eddy Simulation (LES)

• High-performance computing (HPC) and GPU programming

Thesis Proposals

• Numerical methods, turbulence modeling, and CFD programming on the URANOS solver → URANOS GitHub

• Optimal design through CFD-informed databases and optimization strategies