Projects and interests
past and present

Research interests

In addition to the projects listed below, some of my current interests are:

Pollution dispersal in the environment (e.g. microplastics)
Estuarine dynamics
Deep ocean mixing
Atmospheric cloud dynamics
Large-scale transport or aerosols and scavenging
Chemically reactive turbulent flows
Fundamentals of turbulent entrainment
Building ventilation

Plumes of dissolving sugar grains

This project investigated how settling and dissolving particles drive downward flows through solutal buoyancy and drag. By varying particle properties, we identified distinct flow regimes, from laminar, particle-dominated motion to turbulent, fluid-like plumes, and examined how dissolution, collective particle interactions, and fluid-particle coupling shape the resulting dynamics. https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.121881

Iron snow in the core of small rocky planets

In the iron-rich cores of small rocky planets, the interplay of pressure and temperature can cause solidification from the outer boundary inward. Dense iron crystals may form near the core’s periphery, sink into the deeper liquid, and remelt where temperatures are higher, generating compositional convection. These processes influence core dynamics and magnetic field generation, but their small-scale nature challenges large-scale models. Our work aims to refine parameterizations, explicitly including the effects of particle dynamics in models of planetary convection.
https://doi.org/10.5802/crphys.216
https://doi.org/10.1051/epn/2025107

Post-impact metal-silicate mixing

At a late stage of their accretion, rocky planets experienced high-energy planetary impacts, as shown on the sketch. Following each collision, the metal core of the impactor sank as millimetric drops into a molten silicate magma ocean. This project explored the influence of planetary rotation on the amount of mass transfers between the falling metal drops and the surrounding magma. https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevFluids.7.124302
Implications for Earth's formation were derived in: doi.org/10.1016/j.pepi.2024.107168

Settling particle clouds

During my PhD with Michael Le Bars and Benjamin Favier in IRPHE (Marseille, France), I studied particle-laden turbulent thermals — turbulent clouds that descend due to their negative buoyancy. I conducted lab experiments and ran numerical simulations to better understand the collective dynamics of the falling particles, and how they control the ability of such clouds to incorporate ambient fluid through turbulent entrainment. https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevFluids.7.124302
https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevFluids.8.074302

Landslide-induced impulse waves

This project focused on the generation of impulse waves triggered by subaerial landslides. By simplifying the physics at play during wave formation, the objective was to better understand the respective roles of inertia and dissipation in the landslide dynamics, and how these factors influence the transient growth of the resulting wave. This work was carried out during my Master’s thesis at the Institut de Mécanique des Fluides de Toulouse (IMFT), under the supervision of Sylvain Viroulet and Laurent Lacaze. https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevFluids.7.054801

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