In a few words

Francesco Patacchini is a research engineer in scientific computing and, more generally, in applied mathematics. He obtained his PhD at Imperial College London in 2017 under the supervision of Prof. José Antonio Carrillo at the Department of Mathematics. He then occupied a two-year postdoctoral position at the Department of Mathematical Sciences of Carnegie Mellon University, in close collaboration with Prof. Dejan Slepčev. The topics of his PhD and postdoctoral research concerned the analysis and numerical simulation of continuity equations with solution-dependent velocity fields, e.g., gradient flows. This included particle methods for linear and nonlinear diffusion, graph approximations of nonlinear conservative laws, and variational analyses of so-called nonlocal interaction equations arising in many-body systems and including effects such as gravity, biological swarming and crystallization.

He was recruited in December 2019 by IFPEN (Rueil-Malmaison) in the Department of Applied Mathematics, where he is currently part of the development team of the multiphysics simulator ArcTem for the approximation of fluid, heat and chemical flows in sedimentary basins over geological time scales. He has started a close collaboration with Alessio Fumagalli, professor at the Mathematics Department of Politecnico di Milano, around the prediction of nonlinear flow regions in highly heterogeneous porous media in the context of underground storage of CO2 and heat. He has also cosupervised an internship within the department, in collaboration with the Institute for Modelling Hydraulic and Environmental Systems at the University of Stuttgart to help develop mesh-adaptive methods for the modeling and simulation of underground CO2 migration.

He has a SCOPUS database with 16 publications in peer-reviewed journals, an h-index of 7 and 219 citations. He has talked at over 30 international conferences, workshops and seminars. References to his publications and talks can be found on his personel webpage here.

IFPEN’s disciplinary fields
Research subjects
Nonlinear flows in heterogeneous porous media
Analysis and numerics for partial differential equations in porous media
Sedimentary compaction models in geomechanics
Publications
  • A. Fumagalli and F. S. Patacchini. Well-posedness and numerical variational scheme for an adaptive model in heterogeneous porous media. Journal of Computational Physics (2023). ArXiv preprint: 2206.07970. DOI: 10.1016/j.jcp.2022.111844.
  • F. S. Patacchini, M.-C. Cacas-Stentz, N. Maurand, W. Saber-Cherif and F. Willien. A simplified vertical and horizontal geomechanical model for compaction in sedimentary basins. HAL preprint: hal-03536832. DOI: 10.2516/stet/2023019.
  • A. Fumagalli and F. S. Patacchini. Model adaptation for nonlinear elliptic equations in mixed form: existence of solutions and numerical strategies. ESAIM: M2AN (2022). ArXiv preprint: 2103.01668. DOI: 10.1051/m2an/2022016.