Quentin Kriaa

Environmental and geophysical fluid dynamics with broad interest in mixing, particle transport and phase change, notably in clouds.

 

Research Area

 

I am interested in a variety of environmental and geophysical flows. From the surface of the Earth to planetary interiors, these flows share common features—for instance, their sensitivity to planetary rotation, to ambient stratification, as well as their inherently turbulent and multiscale nature.

Due to this coupling between multiple time and length scales, predicting the macroscopic evolution of such flows requires to model small-scale processes, including but not limited to turbulent mixing and pollutant/particle transport. To address this, I conduct fluid laboratory experiments that provide new observations and accurate measurements to improve models which cannot resolve these small-scale processes—in contexts as diverse as extreme precipitation events, microplastics dispersal by river outflows, post-planetary impact mixing of liquid iron in magma oceans, or convection induced by the crystallization and remelting of iron snowflakes in solidifying planetary cores (also known as ‘iron snow’).

My research draws on multiple disciplines, spanning fluid dynamics, physics, and chemistry, with a strong experimental focus. I design scaled-down laboratory analogues that isolate key mechanisms in controlled settings, complemented by scaling analyses and reduced-order numerical and analytical models to deduce practical implications for environmental flows beyond the laboratory context.

 

Project Interests

 

I welcome studentships in wide environmental areas. I notably have a keen interest for multiphase flows involving complex fluid-particle interactions (e.g. in clouds, estuaries, supercooled rivers, volcanic plumes, crystallising magma…). I am also very interested in designing original experiments and simple models to analyse the life cycle of deep convective clouds—from their formation to dissipation through mixing and precipitation—, the large-scale transport of aerosols and their removal from the troposphere through wet deposition, as well as hydrometeor formation and (extreme) precipitations.