Understanding how gas and liquid flow in porous media affect permeability, porosity, and reaction rates

A key challenge for the success of underground carbon storage is development of technology to ensure that the gas will not slowly leak back to the surface over hundreds or thousands of years. This research focuses on understanding how carbon dioxide interacts with underground rocks and fluids, potentially changing their structure and allowing leakage pathways to form. By improving this understanding, the project aims to make underground carbon storage more reliable and effective. The project is also creating elementary education materials, student training opportunities, and publicly accessible open-source software. This project will investigate how fluid flow, chemical reactions, and rock structure and composition interact at very small scales to influence large-scale properties such as permeability and porosity in carbonate rocks. The project is built around a tightly integrated experimental, numerical, and AI-enabled mathematical framework. Microfluidic experiments on real rock samples will be used to identify key processes controlling fluid-rock interactions for different flow conditions and rock compositions. High-resolution numerical simulations will be validated against experiments and deployed to quantify the coupling between different processes. An AI-enabled computation framework will translate small-scale processes into larger-scale models and capture the temporal evolution of rock permeability during reactions. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria. NSF Award ID: 2548718 | Program: 01002627DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT | Principal Investigator: Ilenia Battiato | Institution: Stanford University, STANFORD, CA | Award Amount: $630,000 View on NSF Award Search: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/show-award/?AWD_ID=2548718 View on Research.gov: https://www.research.gov/awardapi-service/v1/awards/2548718.html