Pietro Rastelli received his Ph.D. in May 2022 at the University of Parma; his Ph.D. work has been supervised by Prof Renato Vacondio and co-supervised by Dr. Jean-Christophe Marongiu.

His research project has carried on in collaboration with the company Andritz Hydro, global leader in the manufacture of hydraulic turbines, which are challenging to simulate using the conventional Computational Fluid Dynamics tools. Pelton turbines can be better simulated with numerical particle-based solver such as Smoothed Particles Hydrodynamic methods, which can accurately study the water flows in these hydraulic machineries.

During his Ph.D. Pietro developed a novel methodology to minimize the level of disorder in particles distribution for meshless schemes, like SPH, that increases the accuracy of the simulation results. The numerical algorithm has been implemented in the in-house software of Andritz Hydro and he spent several months at the Andritz Hydro Turbine Research centre in Vevey, Switzerland.

He has always been passionate about everything that involves hydraulics and the study of fluid motions, he is currently employed in Iren Spa, an Italian multiutility which manages water resources. Pietro is a project engineer for the regional water network.

Pietro can be reached at pietro.rastelliPR@gmail.com