On 12 September 2025 Vitor Augusto Regert dos Santos, Alberto Arici and Djamel Eddine Aissaoui joined the AURIGA team as PhD students at the Department of Energy, Politecnico di Milano. Each of them covers a different part of the project: the theory, the mass transfer and the bubble scale.
Vitor Augusto Regert dos Santos is a PhD candidate in Energy and Nuclear Science and Technology. He holds a B.Sc. in Mechanical Engineering from Universidade do Vale do Rio dos Sinos (Brazil) and a master’s degree in Energy Engineering from Politecnico di Milano, with a thesis on the numerical investigation of mass transfer in bubble columns with ionic liquids for CO2 absorption. In the AURIGA project he works on the theoretical research: a mechanistic model that predicts the flow regime transitions in bubble columns and, from them, the global and local flow properties. The model will be validated against experimental and numerical data, to give a predictive tool for the design and scale-up of bubble column reactors.
Alberto Arici is a PhD student in Energy Engineering. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Chemical Engineering and a master’s degree in Nuclear Engineering, both from Politecnico di Milano, with a thesis on sustainable hydrophilic ligands for the selective separation of americium in spent nuclear fuel reprocessing. In the AURIGA project he works on mass transfer and scale-up: the absorption of CO2 in ionic liquid and water mixtures, the step that links the fluid dynamics of the column to the capture of carbon dioxide.
Djamel Eddine Aissaoui is a PhD student in Energy and Nuclear Science and Technology. He holds a master’s degree in Energy Mechanical Engineering, and before starting his PhD he worked as a mechanical engineer in industry on pump design and as a research fellow at the University of Bologna on electrospinning processes. In the AURIGA project he works on the bubble scale: experiments on single bubbles and bubble swarms in the small laboratory columns, which provide the local data the theory is built on.
More information is available on the Team pages of Vitor, Alberto and Djamel.