Two AURIGA doctoral students — Vitor Regert and Djamel Eddine Aissaoui — took part in the 21st UIT Summer School, Pushing the frontiers of thermal-fluid simulations, held at the Certosa di Pontignano near Siena from 31 August to 4 September 2026, and presented their work alongside the other doctoral students attending.
The school is organised by UIT, the Italian Union of Thermofluid Dynamics, and was directed by Fabio Inzoli (Politecnico di Milano) and Enrico Nobile (Università degli Studi di Trieste). Its week of lectures and hands-on sessions covered both the established computational methods and the ones now emerging around them — finite-volume and finite-element schemes alongside machine-learning-assisted solvers, reduced-order models, meshless techniques and the first quantum-inspired approaches, together with open-source CFD platforms and the integration of data-driven techniques into simulation workflows.
The two contributions
Vitor Regert presented the numerical side of the project: why ionic liquids are worth studying in bubble columns, and the gap that makes the work necessary. The closures of the Euler–Euler framework — for drag, for bubble-induced turbulence and for mass transfer — are calibrated on air–water, while the ionic liquid under study is roughly ninety times more viscous, so whether those closures carry over to it is unverified. The contribution assesses them against measured gas holdup and against the empirical correlations.
Djamel Eddine Aissaoui presented the experimental side, and in particular the measurement chain behind the single-bubble data: from the raw high-speed image, through the mask that separates the bubble from the seeded liquid, to the velocity field recovered from a single image pair and the time-averaged field built from many of them. The work is carried out with the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf.
