Welcome to Federico!

Federico Lanza is a Cotutelle PhD student  (joint PhD degree) between LPTMS*/CNRS**/University of Paris-Saclay and NTNU. He joined us in November 2020. His position is financed 50% by the CNRS and 50% by PoreLab and the newly established INTPART project from Alex Hansen entitled: “Non-Newtonian Flow in Porous Media“.  His supervisors are Alberto Rosso, Directeur de Recherche CNRS at the University of Paris-Saclay, and Professor Alex Hansen from the Physics department at NTNU. The title of his PhD project is: “Optimal paths for the flow of yield stress fluids” . Federico will spend half of his time at PoreLab, NTNU, and the other half at the LPTMS.

WELCOME !

Federico holds a Master degree in Physics and a Bachelor degree both in Physics and from the University of Padua, Italy. He performed his thesis project at the CNRS/University of Paris-Saclay. The title of his project was: “Flow of a non-Newtonian Fluid in a Porous Medium

Federico introduces his activities as follow:

Yield stress fluids can flow through the soil only above a critical pressure drop. Although ubiquitous and relevant for industry, the laws governing their flow are still misunderstood. Near the critical pressure drop, the liquid flows only along open channels, showing strong analogies with the plastic depinning of the vortex lattice in a dirty superconductor, or the excited states of directed polymers in random media. In this thesis we plan to extend the methods developed in that context to describe the rheology of a two-phase system (Newtonian and yield stress fluid) in a porous medium, focusing on the evolution of phase interface and on the formation of bubbles of yield stress fluids in the capillary tubes. Our work can also provide new clues on a long standing problem in statistical physics: the glassy transition in finite dimension. We combine different approaches: numerical simulations, optimization algorithms and directed polymer physics.

* Laboratoire de Physique Théorique et Modèles Statistiques

** Centre Nationale de la Recherche Scientifique