Sam Pellone

Sam Pellone received his B.S. in Mechanical Engineering in 2011 from the Université Grenoble Alpes (previously known as Université Joseph Fourier) in Grenoble, France. During his last year, he got introduced to experimental fluid mechanics by performing hot-film and fiber optic probe measurements of two-phase rising bubbly flows.

He then went to the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland and obtained his M.S. in 2013 in Mechanical Engineering as well, with specialization in aero-and hydrodynamics. There, he worked on multiple research projects, including the study of separated flows using hot-wire anemometry and Particle-Image Velocimetry (PIV) in wind tunnels, the visualization of liquid swirling in wine glasses using high-speed cameras, and the stability properties of T-junction micro-mixers using numerical simulations.

He continued to pursue his passion for fluid mechanics by receiving his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering in December of 2020 from the University of Michigan. Under the supervision of Eric Johnsen, he focused and specialized in the computational modeling of hydrodynamic instabilities occurring at material interfaces such as the Richtmyer-Meshkov, Rayleigh-Taylor, and Kelvin-Helmholtz instabilities. He performed high-fidelity numerical simulations and developed a vortex-sheet model.

He is now a postdoctoral researcher at LANL and part of the Extreme Fluids Team (P-2) and the Integrated Design Assessment Team (XTD-IDA). He is performing PIV and PLIF measurements on the VST to understand the effect of initial conditions on shock-driven turbulence and to validate the corresponding numerical simulations using xRAGE. The use of the code xRAGE is also intended to explore the behavior of such flows under high-energy-conditions and support the Mshock experimental campaigns.