Dr Bruño Fraga MSc, PhD, HEA

Dr Bruño Fraga

Department of Civil Engineering
Lecturer of Numerical Modelling
MSc Civil Eng. and Civil Eng. and Management Convenor

Contact details

Address
University of Birmingham
Edgbaston
Birmingham
B15 2TT
UK

Bruño Fraga is a Lecturer of Numerical Modelling in the School of Engineering.

Bruño is a prominent researcher in the field of Computational Fluid Dynamics. He has developed several in-house codes and has published in some of the best journals of the field with collaborators from UK, US, and European institutions. His main expertise is the study of Turbulence, particularly in multi-phase flows, where liquids, gas and solids interact.

He is a passionate lecturer who tries to incorporate examples and some of the newest technological applications in the teaching of Fluids and Hydraulics. He is currently 4th year convenor, head of the CFD Special Interest Group in the University of Birmingham, and member of the Ethics Committee of the University.

Biography

Bruño qualified with a MEng (Hons) and a National Award in Environmental Engineering in Santiago de Compostela University (Spain) in 2007. He obtained a MSc with a merit in Mathematical Engineering and Numerical Simulation in 2009 and started a PhD little after.

His PhD was focused on 3D modelling of flow in natural rivers and open-channel bends, using different turbulence modelling approaches. He was able to self-fund his PhD and spend some time in the universities of Chalmers (Sweden) and Cardiff (UK), where he had his first contact with large-eddy simulation models.

In 2013 Bruño moved to Cardiff University hired as a postdoctoral Research Associate under the supervision of Professor Thorsten Stoesser. His first project during that time consisted in simulating the near-field release of the oil-gas plume created by the blowout of the DeepWater Horizon platform in the Gulf of Mexico. After that, he worked in advanced modelling of scour prediction in rivers, but he would continue to develop work in the field of multiphase flow in parallel. He also worked in the development of hybrid parallelisation techniques for computation.

In 2017 Bruño was appointed as a Lecturer in the University of Birmingham. In 2018, he was a visiting scholar at Stanford University developing a ground-breaking project regarding the physics of bubbly flow in the Centre for Turbulence Research hosted by this university in collaboration with NASA, among others.

Teaching

  • Water Engineering 1 (2nd year).
  • Integrated Project Design 2 (2nd year).
  • Water Engineering 3 (3rd year).
  • Water Engineering and Management (4th year).

Postgraduate supervision

Currently supervising 4 PhD students, 2 as main supervisor.

Research

DNS of bubble swarm

  • Turbulence Modelling.
  • Eco-hydrau.
  • Near- and far-field coupling.
  • Eulerian-Lagrangian methods.
  • Multiphase Flow.
  • Large-eddy Simulation.
  • Direct Numerical Simulation.
  • Lagrangian Particle Tracking.
  • Parallelization.

Publications

Selected Publications

  • Chua, K.V., Fraga, B., Stoesser, T., Hong, S.H. and Sturm, T., 2018. Characterization of turbulent structures in the wake of bridge abutments of variable length. Accepted for publication in Journal of Hydraulic Engineering.
  • Ouro, P., Fraga, B., Lopez-Novoa, U. and Stoesser, T., 2019. Scalability of an Eulerian-Lagrangian large-eddy simulation solver with hybrid MPI/OpenMP parallelisation. Computers & Fluids, 179, pp.123-136.
  • Ouro, P., Fraga, B., Viti, N., Angeloudis, A., Stoesser, T. and Gualtieri, C., 2018. Instantaneous transport of a passive scalar in a turbulent separated flow. Environmental Fluid Mechanics, 18(2), pp.487-513.
  • Fraga, B., & Stoesser, T. (2016). Influence of bubble size, diffuser width, and flow rate on the integral behavior of bubble plumes. Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans, 121(6), pp.3887-3904.
  • Fraga, B., Mitrou, E., & Stoesser, T. (2016). Large -eddy simulations of bubble plumes with and without cross-flow. River Flow 2016: Iowa City, USA, July 11-14, 2016, pp. 834-841.
  • Fraga, B., Stoesser, T., Lai, C. C., & Socolofsky, S. A. (2016). A LES-based Eulerian–Lagrangian approach to pre-dict the dynamics of bubble plumes. Ocean Modelling, 97, pp.27-36.
  • Stoesser, T., McSherry, R., & Fraga, B. (2015). Secondary Currents and Turbulence over a Non-Uniformly Roughened Open-Channel Bed. Water, 7(9), pp.4896-4913.
  • Fraga, B., Cea, L., Peña, E. (2012). Modelling of 3D phenomena in curved channels. Suitability of a 3D shallow waters approximation. Numerical Methods for Hyperbolic Equations: Theory and Applications, pp.736-744. Tay-lor & Francis.

View all publications in research portal