Research

My research interests are in the broad area of industrial and applied mathematics, with a particular interest in modelling of physical processes for sustainable development applications. I combine analytical techniques and numerical techniques to develop and study mathematical models, and use them to provide insight on real-life systems. and my motivation is to use these models as a tool to provide insight on real-life systems. From a mathematical point of view, I am interested in heat and mass transfer, continuum mechanics, moving boundary problems, and dynamical systems. If you are interested in collaborations in these (or related) topics, feel free to contact me.

Lithium-Ion Batteries

Lithium-ion batteries play a very important role in our world and they are called to take an even more relevant position in the near future due to the electrification of transport and the spread of all types of electronic devices. In order to design better batteries and manage them in a more efficient way, mathematical models are a fundamental tool.

We combine analytical and numerical techniques to develop reduced battery models and determine parameter values from experimental data for models including thermal and degradation effects. We are also interested in combining physics-based models and machine learning techniques.

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Thermal Energy Storage

Efficient thermal energy storage is fundamental to decarbonise our energy grid, both for domestic and industrial environments. Further research is needed to deploy these systems economically and at scale, and mathematical modelling can significantly speed up these process.

We apply the learnings and tools developed for lithium-ion batteries to better understand latent and thermochemical energy storage systems and develop simulation tools that can speed up the development of these technologies.

Relevant publications:

Solidification of Binary Alloys

Many of the objects we use in our day-to-day life are made of metal alloys and understanding how they solidify is crucial to improve the casting techniques and obtain materials with better physical properties.

In this work we consider an extended Stefan problem to describe the solidification of binary alloys in different geometries. We apply asymptotic techniques to study the stability of the system and calculate approximate solutions for the problem in planar and spherical geometries. These approximate solutions are validated with numerical simulations of the full problem, and show good agreement with experimental data on metallurgical grade silicon casts.

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