Dr. Andritsos Fivos Official of the European Commission, Joint Research Centre (JRC), Institute for the Protection and Security of the Citizen (IPSC) since 1986
Areas of expertise: systems engineering, safety & security, remote handling & intervention, emergency management, pollution prevention & containment in the maritime, energy, transport and nuclear fields.
Prior employment: research assistant, associate and lecturer at the mechanical engineering dept. of the university of Patras, Greece; guest research associate at the mechanical engineering dept., university of Newcastle upon Tyne, England; associate professor at the technological education institute of Patras, Greece; 301 base military industry of the Hellenic army; mixed quality control group by the Hellenic Arms industry, Hellenic Defence ministry, Aeghion, Grece; technical services of PIRELLI, Patras, Greece.
Author or co-author of more than 140 scientific publications; inventor in 4 patents
Several successful cooperative projects, like ROTIS, ROTIS 2, LOCCATEC, DIFIS and ASPIS
Several successful projects in support of the Commission policies, like: AIPS, TAPS and TAPS 2 (policies on shipbuilding and port/maritime security)
In the aftermath of the “Prestige” disaster, a novel concept for the direct intervention on shipwrecks was conceived at JRC. It was the object of the DIFIS project, which provided, through extensive numerical simulations and scale experiments, the proof of concept, a detailed engineering design and a solid deployment procedure. The “Deepwater Horizon” catastrophe triggered investigations on the applicability of the system for containing oil spills from deep offshore well blowouts.
MIFIS is a modular, re-engineered version of DIFIS that that has the capacity to handle also the expanding gas as well as the formation and dissociation of hydrates. Such system, suitably configured, can serve for the containment of offshore blowouts as well as for interventions on underwater hydrocarbon sources such mud volcanoes and leaking shipwrecks. Equally important, MIFIS can serve for the extraction of natural gas from hydrate deposits, such as those present on a vast portion of the southern part of the Black Sea.