Berkeley Fluids Seminar

Instabilities and Phase Transitions in Multiphase Flow through Porous Media

Monday, March 4, 2019

12:00-13:00, 3110 Etcheverry Hall

Xiaojing (Ruby) Fu

(Earth and Planetary Science)

Abstract: Flow and transport through porous media is ubiquitous in nature. They are key processes behind subsurface resources such as oil and gas, geothermal energy, and groundwater. They also mediate corrosion and ageing of porous engineering materials as well as geohazards such as landslides, volcanic eruptions and earthquakes. Central to many of these processes is the strong coupling between porous media flows and phase transitions—the creation or destruction of fluid or solid driven by thermodynamics. Multiphase flow with phase transitions often leads to dynamic systems that are far from thermodynamic equilibrium. This talk will cover two examples of nonequilibrium phenomena, and new continuum mathematical descriptions to model them. The role of mineral-dissolution reactions during geologic sequestration of carbon dioxide will be discussed first. The modeling of methane clathrate (gas hydrate) in multiphase environments using phase-field methods will then be addressed. Motivated by field and laboratory observations, a description on how the spontaneous formation of a solid hydrate crust on a moving gas-liquid interface gives rise to a new type of flow instability termed here as crustal fingering. It will further be shown that this solid-modulated gas percolation mechanism is crucial to our understanding of methane venting in the world’s oceans, gas hydrate dissociation as a trigger to landslides, and energy extraction from gas hydrate deposits. This research on fluid-solid coupling in porous media can stimulate new questions at the interface of engineering, geosciences and material sciences.

Bio: Xiaojing (Ruby) Fu is a Miller Fellow in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at University of California Berkeley. She is currently developing physics-based models for fluid-solid interactions in volcanology in collaboration with Prof. Michael Manga. Ruby holds a B.S. in Applied Mathematics from Clarkson University, an M.S. in Computation for Design & Optimization from MIT, and a Ph.D. in Civil & Environmental Engineering also from MIT, where she studied multiphase flow in porous media under the mentorship of Prof. Ruben Juanes. She has a strong interest in understanding the physics of multiphase fluid mechanics and how it shapes our environment. Her approach is often mathematical and computational, and she collaborates closely with experimentalists and field scientists. Ruby’s work is applied to a wide range of geoscience problems, including gas hydrate systems, geologic carbon sequestration, volcanology and hydrology.

Back to my webpage

Acknowledgments

Prof. Eliot Quataert on behalf of The Theoretical Astrophysics Center and the Astronomy Department (UC Berkeley)

Prof. Philip S. Marcus on behalf of the Mechanical Engineering Department (UC Berkeley)

Prof. Michael Manga (Earth and Planetary Science, UC Berkeley)

Prof. Evan Variano (Civil and Environmental Engineering, UC Berkeley)