Diana Petrolo
Diana Petrolo received her Ph.D. (with honour) on march 2020 at the University of Parma (supervisor: Prof. Sandro Longo). Her doctoral thesis aimed at increasing the overall understanding on mixing processes in stratified turbulent flows, by exploring the controls on the vertical buoyancy transport. She spent a period of seven months at the British Petroleum Institute for Multiphase Flow at the University of Cambridge, where was introduced to the topic on turbulent mixing in oceans, under the supervision of Prof. Andrew W. Woods. As a matter of fact, vertical mixing process plays a key role in the ocean circulation as it affects the present state of the ocean stratification and may change under very different conditions than those existing today, for example under climate change scenarios. Diana’s project experimentally modelled the ocean circulation by means of a Taylor Couette cell, where fluid was continuously ventilated by a source of fresh and dense water and two sinks that withdrew the same amount of fluid as the supply.
Diana Petrolo has also research interests in inertial gravity currents (GCs), and viscous GCs of Newtonian and non-Newtonian fluids in fractures and porous media. She is currently a post-doctoral research fellow at the University of Parma, in the Department of Engineering and Architecture, where se has received a scholarship on the experimental study of radial GCs draining outward and inward from a cylindrical reservoir.
Diana Petrolo’s master thesis, titled “The role played by chemical and functional additives in reducing odor emissions of bituminous mixtures for road pavements” (supervisor: Prof. Felice Giuliani), received the award “Marco Lucchini” on July 11, 2016.
Diana also received the GII Award for Doctoral Thesis in Water Engineering 2020. In June 2022 she received the National Scientific Qualification (ASN) to be Associate Professor.
