Piero Colonna

Piero Colonna is Professor and Chair of Propulsion and Power at the Delft University of Technology, where he has been a faculty member since 2002. He also became the Director of the Aerospace Engineering Graduate School in 2021. He received his Ph. D. degree from Politecnico di Milano in 1996, a M.Sc. degree in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford University in 1995, and a M.Sc. degree in Aerospace Engineering, also from Politecnico di Milano, in 1991. Prof. Colonna was a recipient of the VIDI personal grant of the Dutch Science and Technology Foundation in 2005 (top ~5% young scientists in NL). His research interests are in the area of non‑ideal compressible fluid dynamics, which he pioneered, thermodynamic properties of working fluids, turbomachinery, and in particular organic Rankine cycle and supercritical CO₂ cycle power systems, which he is a recognized expert. He authored more than 150 articles in peer refereed journals and conference proceedings, co-authored a thermodynamics textbook, served as Associate Editor of the ASME Journal for Engineering of Gas Turbine and Power, is Associate Editor of the Journal of the Global Propulsion and Power Society. He also served in the board of the International Gas Turbine Institute since 2014 and has been the IGTI Chairman from 2015 to 2017 (two terms) and is currently a member of the Advisory Board of the Global Propulsion and Power Society. He is currently a board member of the SU2 foundation (SU2 is an open-source multi-physics engineering design software). He launched the International Seminar on ORC Power systems in 2011 and served as Chairman and in various positions in the Knowledge Center on ORC Power systems - KCORC. In 2011 and 2012 he was awarded the Best Lecturer Award for the Master Program in Sustainable Energy and Process Technologies and for that of Fluid Mechanics of the TU Delft and pioneered online education with a Master-level course on modeling of energy systems for students and professionals. He is the author with the late Prof. W.C. Reynolds of a textbook on engineering thermodynamics published by Cambridge University Press, and is now developing a European Course on Engineering Thermodynamics experimenting with novel teaching methods.