Maurizio Quadrio, PhD, is Professor of Fluid Dynamics and Turbulence at Politecnico di Milano, Director of the Flow Control Lab at the Department of Aerospace Science and Technologies, and Mercator Fellow at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology.
In his research he combines simulations and experiments to study wall-bounded turbulent flows, with a focus on turbulent skin-friction drag reduction, obtained with active (spanwise forcing) or passive (riblets) approaches. Direct numerical simulation is extensively used to develop drag reduction techniques, often used as a tool to probe wall turbulence and to improve the understanding of its complex physics. Having developed a satisfactory theoretical framework for the skin-friction drag reduction problem, he is currently trying to investigate how a locally reduced skin friction can be leveraged to affect the overall aerodynamic drag of the flow around bodies of complex shape.
The scientific interests of Prof. Quadrio extend to CFD and adjoint-based optimization. Well before the COVID era, he has become interested also in the airflow within the human nasal cavities: understanding how it relates to an healthy breathing, and designing optimal surgeries via simulations are two endeavors that relate very tightly to flow control. Dealing with extreme anatomical variability, and aiming at the design of tools that must suite a clinical context are the current challenges, addressed with a multidisciplinary approach that includes computational geometry, machine learning and ad-hoc models for the fluid dynamics in the human nose.
