Remembering a real Teacher

There is no better way to remember those who are gone than to remember what they taught us.

Prof. Ing. Carlo Vecile was my second "relatore" on my "Tesi di Laurea", an experimental project that lasted about one year at the end of my Mechanical Engineering Degree in 1991-92.

As I got the news of his passing, today I dug in the box of old pictures and found the best I could, unfortunately not a very clear one, and along is a scan from the Thesis, with the Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) plots of the Axial Flow Compressor we designed, built and tested under the guidance of Prof. Ing. Giovanni Mosetti, my first "relatore", with whom I still enjoy conversations about many topics of Engineering and Life.

Thanks to Prof. Vecile I had access, one of the first students at University of Trieste to the first commercially available CFD software, FIDAP, running on the CRAY supercomputer of the "Centro di Calcolo". It was a very enjoyable experience, even if we had a very tedious work in creating the Finite Elements mesh with the Patran preprocessor almost manually and then exporting it for FIDAP along with several supporting files before running a calculation that could last hours or days only for a mere 2-D result which we had to re-import in PATRAN for the postprocessing and visualization.

And this helped a lot to optimize the blades profiles before going in to even more tedious prototyping to build the blade model, casting 16 of them, making the rotor, the stator (in a similar way) and building the whole machine.

All I learned in that project made me what I have been for the nest 30 years and taught me what I am still doing with pleasure: creating new machines, no matter how complex, from first principles, through the most efficient engineering process, until they work.

So, my gratitude goes to my teachers.