Shortly after graduating in Aeronautical Engineering at Politecnico di Milano in December 2011, Nicolò started his PhD studies in Stockholm (Sweden) at KTH under the supervision of Prof. Dan Henningson and Dr. Shervin Bagheri. He defended his thesis "Transition-Delay in boundary-layer flows via reactive control" in June 2016.
Since January 2017 he is employed as a post-doc at ONERA where he worked on flow-reconstruction techniques via data-assimilation and, starting from January 2018, on the stability of flexible micro-pillars interacting with boundary-layer flows whithin the ERC-AEROFLEX project.
In October 2017, he won the 12th edition of the ERCOFTAC da Vinci competition for his research during his PhD studies.
Interaction of flexible micro-pillars with boundary-layer flows
Depending on the pillars' stiffness, number and relative height with respect to the boundary-layer thickness, the pillars bend and form a recirculation region downstream their position. In this region the typical travelling-wave instabilities of the boundary layer flows - the Tollmien-Schlichting waves - compete with the Kelvin-Helmotz instability that sits on the limit of the recirculation region.
Resolvent analysis of the full fluid-solid system is used to study these types of instabilities looking for a potentially beneficial interaction between fluid and solid and/or the possibility to use each pillar as a self-localised sensor/actuator.
Recent conferences
2017 L. Franceschini, N. Fabbiane, O. Marquet, B. Leclaire, J. Dandois and D. Sipp: Data-driven turbulence modelling applied to separated flows. NASA/UMich Symp. on Advances in Turbulence Modeling, Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA.
2017 N. Fabbiane, O. Marquet and B. Leclaire: Adjoint-based meanflow reconstruction of laminar separated bubbles based on PIV data. 2nd Workhop on Data-Assimilation and CFD for PIV and PTV, Delft, The Netherlands.
Recent publications
2017 N. Fabbiane, S. Bagheri and D.S. Henningson: Energy efficiency and performance limitations of linear adaptive control for transition delay. J. Fluid Mech. 810: 6081, doi:10.1017/jfm.2016.707