Exciting news today! I have been awarded an ERC StG. This 1.5 Million Euro grant will allow me to build a team to investigate flows in porous media with morphology modifications. What do rocks, ice and snow have in common? Find it out here!

MORPHOS – Flow-induced morphology modifications in porous multiscale systems

Porous media with morphology modifications are everywhere around us. For example, think of a snowpack subject to snow melting and water refreezing. Snow represents one of the largest freshwater resources available on Earth, and predicting its dynamics is crucial to have reliable climate models. But… snow is an extremely complex system, consisting of a solid icy matrix filled with air. When the ice crystals at the top of the snowpack melt due to the solar radiation, the resulting meltwater penetrates downwards, eventually refreezing. Water, ice and air interact in a complex manner, exchanging heat and influencing each other dynamics: as a result, predicting the evolution of snowpacks is challenging.

Another example of flow-induced morphology evolution is the dissolution of rocks in underground formations. During the process of geological carbon dioxide sequestration or in presence of Karstic formations, the porous rocks “dissolve” or “grow” due to the local increase of the concentration of minerals, e.g., calcite. This effect produces a variation in the medium morphology, namely new paths may open or existing pores close, and thus influences the flow: also in this case, determining the effect of the flow on the medium morphology, and viceversa, is arduous: dissolution or mineralization occur over hundreds or thousands of years, and experiments and modelling in analogue systems are essential.

A further category of processes involving flow-induced morphology variations is represented by the formation of sea ice or the solidification of multicomponent alloys. For instance, when sea ice forms, water solidifies generating an icy porous matrix, while salt is rejected, producing a local increase of the salt concentration (a video capturing possible consequences of this fascinating phenomenon is shown below). This will make sea water denser and generate a flow that interacts with the newly formed porous ice, influencing the subsequent system evolution.

These are just few of the natural and industrial processes involving flow-induced morphology modifications. In addition to the tangled fluid-medium interactions mentioned above, the dynamics of these systems is made more complex by their multiscale nature: the transport processes occurring at the small scales (pore-scale) influence also the large-scale dynamics, and investigating all these phenomena simultaneously is an ambitious task. In this project, with simulations, experiments and physical models, we will shed new light on the elusive dynamics of these complex systems.

Stay tuned, updates will follow! [see this page]

See also the press release by ERC and TU Wien, and the articles with details on the project in English and German.