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Ven 12 Dic
Seminari e Convegni

Gas bubbles and volcanoes: a voyage through scales

The seminar Gas bubbles and volcanoes: a voyage through scales will take place on December 12th from 3 pm to 4 pm in Aula Denina, with a talk by researcher Simone Colucci from Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia - INGV.

Abstract
A growing body of natural and experimental evidence indicates that microscale bubble dynamics have a fundamental impact on macroscopic magmatic processes at depth, driving transitions between effusive and explosive eruptive styles and significantly affecting volcanic risk. Modelling these transitions requires developing realistic micro-scale models for bubble dynamics and coupling them with fluid dynamics modelling of large-scale magma flow. While large-scale flow models are well-established and widely used, further advancements are needed to model bubble dynamics at the micro-scale. Most bubble dynamics models neglect the polydispersity (i.e., non-uniformity) of the bubble distribution. Furthermore, experimental validation remains challenging. We show a new population balance model that describes the time evolution of a polydisperse distribution of gas bubbles in magma due to nucleation, growth and coalescence. The model is validated using, for the first time, in situ experimental observations of the time evolution of the distribution of the bubble population in a real degassing magma.

Speaker: Simone Colucci - INGV

Biography
Simone Colucci is a researcher at INGV, Sezione di Pisa.
He obtained his bachelor's degree in Geology (2006) and his master's degree in Geodynamics, Geophysics, and Volcanology (2008) at Sapienza Università di Roma. He received his Ph.D. in Earth Science in 2012 from the same university. As a Ph.D. student, he spent a period of study at the University of New Hampshire in the USA. In 2013, he obtained a postgraduate specialisation degree in Scientific Calculus from the Department of Mathematics at Sapienza Università di Roma. In 2012, he joined the INGV as a postdoctoral fellow. Since 2019, he has been working as a researcher at INGV.
His research activities focus on the development and application of mathematical and computational models for studying the dynamics of volcanic eruptions. In particular, his research aims to elucidate the mechanisms through which the microphysical aspects of geophysical processes are coupled with macroscale dynamics.