(6fg) Coupled Ion Transport and Fluid Flow in Energy and Environmental Sciences

Research Interests: Transport Phenomena, Fluid Mechanics, Energy Storage, Porous Media, Electrokinetics, Interfacial Phenomena, High Performance Computing, Applied Mathematics

Teaching Interests: Transport Phenomena, Thermodynamics, Fluid Mechanics, Mathematical Methods for Engineering, Numerical Analysis, Parallel Programming

---------------------------

Many existing challenges in energy and environmental sciences require a multi-physics approach. Ion transport, fluid flow, and surface chemistry in porous media are all important in many problems. Examples include energy storage in batteries, water desalination through electrostatic deionization, and electrokinetic remediation of contaminated soil, as well as enhanced recovery techniques like low salinity water flooding and hydraulic fracturing. Although these problems are inherently multi-scale and multi-physics, they are fundamentally described by similar physiochemical processes. My future research will focus on understanding fundamental mechanisms of ion transport and fluid flow in porous media, using theoretical and computational approaches, to improve existing technologies and guide novel applications.

During my PhD at UC Santa Barbara, I was supervised by Prof. Frederic Gibou and Prof. Todd Squires, and developed efficient computational techniques for studying ion transport in porous media. These methods are based on advanced techniques such as adaptive mesh refinement and parallel computing to enable high fidelity simulations. In my PhD, I illustrated the significance of pore microstructure and surface conduction in accelerating the charging kinetics which inspired new guidelines for designing porous electrodes. As a postdoctoral researcher at MIT in Prof. Martin Bazant’s lab, I am currently investigating applications of electric fields in controlling fluid instabilities and enhancing hydraulic fracturing. My work in this area has led to the discovery that electro-osmotic flows can control viscous fingering instabilities. This finding has exciting implications for active fluid manipulation under confinements. I am further investigating use of electric fields in improving the efficiency of hydraulic fracturing for shale gas harvesting.

As a new faculty, I will apply my combined knowledge of transport phenomena and mechanics as well as computational skills to challenging problems in energy and environmental sciences. In particular, my research group will focus on exploring novel applications in the area of geomechanics and two-phase electrokinetic flows for enhanced oil and gas recovery. For instance, while recent experimental observations suggest that low-salinity water injection can substantially improve secondary oil recovery, the exact cause is still debated. This is currently a very active area of research involving multi-physical processes such as ion transport, fluid flow, and surface chemistry which span several orders of magnitude in both time- and length-scales. I am also interested to further understand and optimize the performance of capacitive deionization technology for water desalination and energy storage. In particular, recent developments in “flow-electrode” design hold great promise as a fast switching and high-density grid-scale energy storage solution where power demands are intermittent. I am confident that my expertise in computational and theoretical modeling put me in a unique position to tackle these problems and help me to advance these fields in collaboration with experimentalist colleagues.