Constraining the key controls on ice melting in glaciers and the ocean is essential for climate models. Edoardo Bellincioni is a PhD student, currently working in the Physics of Fluids group at the University of Twente under the supervision of Sander Husiman and Detlef Lohse. During his PhD, Edoardo has been running laboratory experiments to characterise the melting of ice particles immersed in turbulent water.
Edoardo has been using a sophisticated laboratory setup, including a water tank in the shape of a regular dodecahedron and a volume of about 200 litres. At each of the 20 vertices of the dodecahedron, a 3D-printed toroidal propeller is connected to an electric motor to drive a flow. This setup produces a homogeneous, isotropic, and statistically stationary turbulence field in the water, with the turbulence strength being a function of the propeller speed. Edoardo has used image analysis to quantify the rate of melting of a spherical particle of ice immersed in the water inside the tank, and explore how the melting is affected by the turbulence.
To investigate the melting of ice in glaciers, Edoardo has also been running a separate series of laboratory experiments using blocks of ice or paraffin wax on a slope. He has developed a new heat balance model for the melting of the ice at the contact surface, assuming that Poiseuille and Couette flow occur within the melt layer.
Edoardo is part of a wide group of researchers working on climate and environmental flows in Twente: you can read more about their work here.