“Noise in Fluids”, presented by Professor Flandoli, full professor of Probability and Mathematical Statistics, has been awarded a funding of over 1 million 700 thousand euros by the European Research Council, with the Scuola Normale as the institution hosting the project, which is of 5 years' duration and will involve the recruitment of 8 post-docs.


PISA, 31 August 2022. Professor Franco Flandoli, full professor of Probability and Mathematical Statistics at the Scuola Normale Superiore, has been awarded a funding of over 1 million 700 thousand euros (1,785,875 euros) for a research project on the study of motion in fluids, which will be carried out entirely at the Scuola Normale – the hosting institution – and which will involve a research team consisting of 8 post-doctoral researchers. The project - Noise in Fluids – will be of 5 years' duration and is due to start officially in January 2023.

 “Noise in Fluids”, one of the the winners of the latest round of ERC Advanced Grant competitions, among the most prestigious awards for frontier research assigned by the European Union, will be studying various aspects linked to the turbulence of fluids, in the search for results applicable to a wide spectrum of phenomena including atmospheric ones. Firstly, the study aims at investigating which probability calculation models in fluid dynamics most realistically describe some characteristics of fluids, with a main focus on the behavior at boundary layers (the portions of fluid in contact with and in the immediate vicinity of a solid surface), and the interactions with obstacles. It will go on to draw various conclusions from this stochastic modelling.

 “A central idea of the project”, explains Professor Flandoli, “is to understand how turbulence of small-scale fluid motions (one can imagine a myriad of small vortices) influences large scale motions, those that also have the greatest practical and technological impact; for example, a classic intuition of Joseph Boussinesq, a mathematician studying the mechanics of fluids, in 1877, was that small-scale turbulence could produce greater large-scale dissipation and viscosity. Modern methods of stochastic analysis enable us to carry out a more rigorous study of these phenomena, and to examine strictly theoretical questions linked to them, such as the possibility that the greater viscosity described above may contribute to the well posedness of the Navier-Stokes equations in dimension three”.

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