Professor Marcello Lappa

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering

Personal statement

M. Lappa is a Full Professor at the Department of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering of the Public University of Strathclyde (UK, Glasgow), where he is also the Leader (main Programme Advisor of Studies) of the MSc courses in Mechanical Engineering and the Head of the James Weir Fluid Laboratory research team.

Since 2021, he is listed in the "World Ranking of Top 2% Scientists" in Stanford University database (both "Single year" and "Career" versions) in the subfield Fluids & Plasmas: August 2024 data-update for "Updated science-wide author databases of standardized citation indicators", see Table_1_Authors_singleyr_2022_pubs_since_1788_wopp_extracted_202310.xlsx and Table_1_Authors_career_2023_pubs_since_1788_wopp_extracted_202408.xlsx

Over the last 25 years, he has authored 3 international books (2004, Elsevier Science, Cambridge; 2009, John Wiley & Sons, Chichester; 2012, John Wiley & Sons, Chichester) and more than 200 publications (over 130 articles in high impact-factor peer reviewed journals or as book chapters, most of which as single author, http://www.researchgate.net/profile/Marcello_Lappa/publications, and 70 other conference and technical papers). His research focuses on fluid motion and stability behaviour, computational fluid dynamics, incompressible and compressible fluid flows, organic and inorganic materials sciences and crystal growth, multiphase flows, solidification, high-temperature gas-dynamics, particle dynamics and microgravity science.

He has conducted (as a PI) scientific experiments in the fields of fluids and materials science on board the international Space Station, which have attracted the attention of several media and the UK Government (https://t-paola.co.uk/). Articles describing his research have appeared in newspapers such as THE TIMES (02 January 2019, Pag. 16).

At the University of Strathclyde he currently leads a group consisting of Research Associates and several PhD Students. Over recent years he has secured (in a position of Principal Investigator) over £ 2.1 million of external funding. Funds have been attracted from a set of different sources, e.g., EPSRC, STFC, UKSA, ESA and industrial entities. He seats in the Steering Committees of several conferences (ICTEA, ICCES, ICFVM, ParCFD, ICOME, ICCMREA, AMT, ICMAPH) and acts as a Reviewer for several funding bodies (EPSRC-UK, DFG-Germany, FNRS-Belgium, GIF-Israel, ANVUR-Italy, NSERC-Canada, NVSTE-Kazakhstan and the European Space Agency) and the Times Higher Education World University Rankings. Since 2005 he has served as the Editor-in-Chief of the International Scientific Journal "Fluid Dynamics & Materials Processing", which is currently abstracted and Indexed in SCOPUS and the Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI) of Web of Science, Thomson Reuters/Clarivate Analytics Master Journal List.

Expertise

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Prize And Awards

World Ranking of Top 2% Scientists "Career" database (2024): Recipient; 16/9/2024
ScholarGPS "Top scholar" 2024: Recipient; 2/8/2024
World Ranking of Top 2% Scientists database (2023): Recipient; 10/10/2023
World Ranking of Top 2% Scientists "Career" database (2023): Recipient; 10/10/2023
Teaching Excellence Award Nomination: Recipient; 18/5/2023
World Ranking of Top 2% Scientists database (2022): Recipient; 10/10/2022

More prizes and awards

Publications

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Publications

3D waveforms and patterning behavior in thin monodisperse and multidisperse vertically-vibrated layers: Watson Peter, Bonnieu Sebastien Vincent, Anwar Ali, Lappa Marcello; Granular Matter (2024); https://doi.org/10.1007/s10035-024-01488-2
Experimental analysis of vibrationally-induced fluidization of lunar regolith in hoppers and closed containers: Watson Peter, Bonnieu Sebastien Vincent, Anwar Ali, Lappa Marcello; 75th International Astronautical Congress (2024)
On the various numerical methods for the simulation and validation of thermovibrationally-driven solid particle accumulation phenomena in microgravity conditions: Manayil Santhosh Balagopal, Anwar Ali, Lappa Marcello; 75th International Astronautical Congress (2024)
A combustion-driven facility for hypersonic sustained flight simulation: Esposito Antonio, Lappa Marcello, Allouis Christophe; Journal of Aerospace Science, Technologies & Systems Vol 103, pp. 271-287 (2024); https://doi.org/10.1007/s42496-024-00213-9
An experimental and numerical investigation into the sensitivity of Rayleigh-Bénard convection to heat loss through the sidewalls: Ferialdi Hermes, Lappa Marcello; Physica D: Nonlinear Phenomena Vol 464 (2024); https://doi.org/10.1016/j.physd.2024.134190
Vibrationally driven particle formations in fluid systems with bimodal thermal inhomogeneities: Manayil Santhosh Balagopal, Lappa Marcello; Physics of Fluids Vol 36 (2024); https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0208124

More publications

Teaching

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Teaching

Current:

16429 (SEM2) Computational Fluid Dynamics (4th year).

Contents: What is CFD?; Typical Applications; The continuum hypothesis, control volumes and surfaces; Integral Formulation of the Balance Equations; The General Unsteady Convection/DiffusionTransport Equation; Space and Time Integration: Finite Volume (FV) Methods; Explicit and Implict FV Methods; Diffusive and convective terms; High-order approximation; The Upwind approach; The “local” or “differential” formulation of the balance equations; The differential formulation of the “unsteady convection/diffusion equation”; Time discretization and space schemes in Finite Difference Methods; Characteristic numbers and simplified versions of the balance equations; Incompressible Flow: The Projection Method and Pressure-based solvers; Thermal Problems: The Boussinesq approximation; Fully Compressible Flow: Density based solvers: Steady and Unsteady Flows; Solvers for steady flow. Turbulence models: What is Turbulence?; Direct Numerical Simulation (DNS) and the concept of Kolmogorov length scale; Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes equations (RANS) and related models (k-e); Isotropic Turbulence & The Large Eddy Simulation (LES); The Smagorinsky-Lilly model.

Past:

ME301 Heat and Flow 3

ME203 Heat and Flow 2

ME205 Fluid Mechanics 2

ME101 Heat and Flow 1

ME108 Engineering Analysis and Numerical Methods

ME514 Advanced Topics in Fluid System Engineering

Research

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Research Interests

Fluid mechanics, thermal sciences and related computational techniques are my primary research interests. Various scientific fields, including (but not limited to) thermal, mechanical and materials engineering, marine, aeronautical and aerospace engineering, organic and inorganic crystal growth, life sciences and many other related fields employ the results of these disciplines.

I am interested in studying problems of practical impact and enjoy the process of exploring applications in different domains, abstracting the essence of the considered subjects, and devising and analyzing techniques that offer solutions to a wide spectrum of real world applications. It is my experience that many superficially different problems, in fact, may share inherent characteristics. Understanding these aspects often enables us to tackle the problem at a deeper level and to develop better solutions that apply across a number of domains. I believe that, in addition to critical thinking and creativity, the ability to appreciate both industrial applications and fundamental research is equally important.

My current research team includes:

Visiting Scholars:

Keiichiro Kato (Tokyo University of Science)

PhD students (as a first supervisor):

Balagopal Manayil Santhosh

Peter Watson

Ahmed Aljanadi

Udom Evans Joel

Former PhD students:

Wasim Waris (Viva held on 24/2/2023)

Georgie Crewdson (Viva held on 6/2/2023, currently working at https://www.aac-clyde.space/)

Alessio Boaro (Viva held on 2/12/2022)

Saad Inam completed his PhD on Feb 2022 (currently Research Associate at the University of Southampton)

Hermes Ferialdi (Viva held on 30/01/2020, Currently working at PLUS s.r.l., https://www.plusolutions.it/ )

Former Research Associates:

Dr. Mohammed Moshfeghi

Dr. Monica Kerr (until August 1st 2022)

Dr. Paolo Capobianchi (Nov 2018 - Nov 2020; current position: Lecturer/ Assistant Professor )

Dr. Thomas Burel (March 2019 - Dec 2020) - founder of the SIMUNI company (https://www.simuni.fr/en/), whose mission is CFD, multi-scale simulations of complex fluid phenomena and high-performance computing.

The following list gives a brief account of the past and present research topics of immediate interest to me. These subjects include both canonical problems and emerging technologies.

Thermogravitational flows

Buoyancy convection
High Temperature Thermal Convection in High Power Density Processes
Furnace Engineering
Buoyant rising jets originated from discrete sources of buoyancy

Multi phase flows

Two-phase flows
Drop coalescence and aggregation phenomena
Drop coalescence and wetting prevention phenomena
Thermocapillary migration of drops and bubbles
Convective phenomena in liquid-liquid systems with a miscibility gap
Flows with phase change and/or crystallization.

Solid particle dynamics

Dynamics of dispersed particles in metal alloys and emulsions.
Solid Particle Sedimentation.
Solid particle spontaneous accumulation phenomena (inertial particle clustering).
Ordering and transport of small particles in incompressible flows.
Dynamics of particles in supersonic flow (blast wave propagation in dusty gas)

CFD applied to Materials Processing

Thermal, mechanical and electromagnetic control of stability of flows driven by convection in crystal growth processes and devices.
Modeling of solidifying interfaces (enthalpy method and related variants).
Numerical tracking of moving fronts and boundaries (for inorganic and organic crystal growth processes and for biological tissue growth).
Control of flow patterns and their stability
Control of three-dimensional instabilities of convective flows by means of static magnetic fields
Control of three-dimensional instabilities of convective flows by means of thermovibrational effects

Thermocapillary (Marangoni) flows

Stability of Marangoni flow in cylindrical liquid bridges and floating-column configurations
Marangoni flow in non-cylindrical (e.g., deformed by the effect of gravity) configurations
Marangoni flows in open (2D and 3D) cavities driven by temperature gradients along the free surface
Marangoni-Bènard systems (hexagonal flow patterns and subsequent transitions)
Thermal Marangoni flow around droplets surrounded by a miscible or immiscible liquid

Thermovibrational flows

Averaged models for flows driven by time-periodic forces (e.g., vibrations, g-jitter).
Vibration-induced (g-jitter) stabilization and destabilization of flows (crystal growth in microgravity and in normal gravity conditions)

Methods of numerical analysis in Computational Fluid Dynamics and Heat/Mass Transfer

Finite volume method in computational fluid dynamics
Volume of Fluid (VOF) methods for tracking of moving fronts and boundaries
Level set method for tracking of moving fronts and boundaries

High Performance Computing

Parallelization of CFD codes on parallel computers (e.g., Cray T3E).
Parallelization programming tools (Message Passing Interface, MPI)

Biological fluid dynamics

Growth, kinetics and morphological evolution of organic protein crystals.
Periodic precipitation and sedimentation of proteins (crystallization of organic substances in liquid phase, multi-crystal configurations).
Multiple crystal nucleation phenomena in liquid phase.
Evaluation of fluid dynamic effects on the growth and morphological stability of protein crystals.
Application of Volume of Fluid and level-set methods to the growth of protein crystals.

Tissue Engineering and CFD

Modeling of the growth of organic tissues in rotating bioreactors.
Analysis of shape evolution as a function of environmental factors (e.g., the shear fluid dynamic stress)
Application of VOF and level-set methods to the growth of biological tissue in vitro.