Research
My research uses laboratory experiments to investigate stratified and rotating flows across a range of environmental and engineering problems, from atmospheric and oceanic dynamics to building ventilation and offshore wind. A common theme across these projects is the role of stratification, wave generation, mixing, and transport in shaping complex flows.
Offshore wind farms and atmospheric gravity waves
When wind farms make waves.
As offshore wind farms continue to grow in size, they are beginning to interact not only with the atmospheric boundary layer, but also with the capping inversion and the stratified free atmosphere above. At these scales, wind farms can generate gravity waves that propagate energy and momentum over long distances, altering the flow far upstream and downstream of the farm itself.
In this new line of research, I investigate when and how offshore wind farms radiate gravity waves, and how these wave-induced effects feed back onto the surrounding atmospheric flow. This is a timely problem in sustainability and environmental fluid mechanics, because these processes are still largely absent from current wind-farm models despite their potential importance for power prediction, wake evolution, and regional flow modification.
To study these mechanisms in a controlled way, I use laboratory experiments in a long stratified water flume, where a model wind farm is towed through a density stratification designed to mimic the atmospheric capping layer. These experiments make it possible to isolate the onset of wave generation and to quantify how atmospheric stratification controls the coupling between wind farms and the larger-scale flow.
Thermal stratification and mixing in confined spaces
The fluid dynamics of buildings result from a complex interplay between energy sources acting at different spatial scales, large-scale convective motions, and diapycnal mixing. Predicting how this interplay produces or erodes thermal stratification in enclosed spaces is an important open question for estimating energy consumption and mitigating risks associated with contaminant transport.
In this work, we use a highly instrumented computer laboratory to investigate thermal stratification in a mechanically ventilated room. Heating sources near floor level are typically non-uniform and time-dependent, creating thermal boundary conditions that lie between localised buoyancy sources, which tend to generate turbulent plumes and maintain stable stratification, and distributed sources, which tend to destabilise it.
Temperature and CO2 are measured at key positions throughout the room, while the heat input from computers is metered and occupancy is recorded. Together, these measurements provide insight into the flow and mixing within the space and allow us to estimate the room energy budget.
This work is part of the project DStratify.
Internal gravity wave turbulence
A central part of my research focuses on gravity waves in stratified fluids and their role in mixing and transport in the ocean and atmosphere. During my postdoctoral work in the research group of Prof Nicolas Mordant, I investigated experimentally how internal gravity waves transfer energy across scales and how wave-dominated flows transition toward turbulence.
To address these questions, I carried out experiments at the Coriolis facility in Grenoble using advanced measurement techniques that allowed me to resolve the velocity field in space and time. These uniquely detailed datasets provide a powerful way to examine how internal-wave forcing generates different dynamical regimes, from weakly nonlinear wave interactions to strongly turbulent states.
More broadly, this work aims to improve our understanding of one of the least constrained components of the ocean energy budget: how internal waves ultimately contribute to mixing in stratified environments.
Rotating flows, baroclinic instability, and climate dynamics
My earlier work focused on stratified rotating flows as laboratory models of atmospheric and climate dynamics. During my PhD, I developed two novel configurations of the classical baroclinic annulus experiment to better capture aspects of mid-latitude atmospheric dynamics.
These experiments allowed me to investigate the interaction between large-scale Rossby waves and smaller-scale gravity waves, with particular emphasis on the spontaneous emission of gravity waves from balanced flow. I studied the conditions for wave generation and propagation experimentally, in close connection with comparable numerical simulations carried out at the University of Frankfurt.
More broadly, this line of research used idealised laboratory experiments to explore how rotating and stratified flows can shed light on large-scale circulation variability, wave generation, and the dynamics underlying climate-relevant fluid systems.