Research Interests
My overarching goal is to work interdisciplinarily with academia and industry to identify, develop, trial, and commercialize subsurface solutions for advanced geothermal systems, economic de-risking, and renewable energy!
Currently, I am engaged in a PhD project focusing on conjugate heat transfer in porous media, examining scales and non-linear effects from pore to Darcy scales. This research is crucial for applications involving gas flows and porous media, such as supercritical CO2 (scCO2) in geothermal systems and optimizing thermal energy storage systems. To address flow regimes across various scales, we rely on scaling laws like the Rayleigh-Nusselt relation. To quantify the different dynamics, I develop methods in computational fluid dynamics (CFD) using the Lattice Boltzmann Method (LBM) in collaboration with the High-Performance Computing Group at the University of Geneva. We benchmark the code with experiments in our optical lab (PIV & BOS) and conduct experiments that are not feasible with numerical simulations. A better understanding of heat and mass transfer in porous media is vital for applications aiming to maximize surface area for heat transport and exchange, which heavily depend on appropriate modeling approaches.
My prior work included experimental studies of multi-phase flows in geological fractures to analyze velocities and sweep efficiencies.