Dr. Luigi Martinelli

Biography

Martinelli completed undergraduate studies in aeronautical engineering at Politecnico di Milano and earned his Ph.D. from Princeton in 1987. He remained a Research Staff member at Princeton, continuing the development of computational fluid dynamics methods in collaboration with his Ph.D. adviser, Antony Jameson, at the time when the MAE department was one of the worldwide leading centers in the field. He joined the faculty in 1994, teaching courses in Aerodynamics, Applied Computational Mathematics, and Design. Martinelli’s research is primarily motivated by a desire to improve the aerodynamic efficiency of airplanes, cars, ships, and energy conversion devices, concerned with a variety of fundamental problems at the intersection of aerodynamics and computational science and engineering design. He has contributed to the development of fast multigrid methods for the solution of viscous conservation laws in both compressible and incompressible regimes. He has made noted contributions to the development of efficient shape design optimization methods based on the Reynolds Averaged Navier-Stokes equations, which are widely used in the industry for the aerodynamic design of contemporary transonic airplanes. Martinelli received the 2003 Graduate Mentoring Award from the McGraw Center at Princeton University and enjoys coding for the generation of CFD solvers.

Research Interests