Dr. Stefano Brizzolara

The focus of Brizzolara's research is the intelligent integration and application of CFD tools for the design of innovative unconventional high speed hull forms and propulsion devices. He founded and currently coordinates the Marine CFD Group, a research team devoted to the development, application and validation of CFD methods for Marine hydrodynamics, ranging from BEM, RANSE and SPH methods.

His professional experience includes service in the Italian Navy which included a period spent at the cavitation tunnel of the Italian Navy in Rome; responsibility for experimental research on propellers and hydrofoils; four years in the hydrodynamic design office of Fincantieri Navy Ship Division (Genoa, Italy); designing navy ships, monohull fast ferries (parent hulls to the newest LCS of US Navy) and navy propellers.

At Sea Grant, Brizzolara is refining the design of an autonomous surface vehicle for assistance and maintenance of underwater vehicles. The vehicle will have superior seakeeping qualities (operability in high sea states), and reduced power requirements due to the unconventional SWATH hull form, whose shape is optimized through an automatic parametric hull form procedure for the given design operation profile. The ride qualities of the vessel in irregular sea states will be optimized through a new time domain seakeeping simulation method, currently under development, which considers the effect of different configurations of active fins or gyroscopic stabilizers and true 3D fully viscous estimation of the added mass and damping coefficients.

Other topics Brizzolara is currently pursuing in collaboration with his group, the Marine CFD Group of the University of Genoa, include the study of a combined numerical and physical model of the hydrodynamic characteristics of a supercavitating surface piercing hydrofoils for very high speed applications (100 knots); development of a "target vessel," a medium size (20m) autonomous surface vessel with dual operating modes (displacement mode at moderate speed an diesel electric propulsion and foilborn mode on four pairs of supercavitating hydrofoils); and ,with the MIT Sea Grant research team, an investigation of the unsteady propulsion characteristics (propeller/hull interaction) of an all electric ship in crash stop and backing/reverse maneuvers, studied by means of a dedicated simulation method integrating numerical hydrodynamic codes and simulation of the electromechanical propulsion chain