PD on fluid flow under klinkenberg conditions

Flow through porous materials is subject to a large range of applications, including fuel cells, catalysts, subsurface CO2- and energy storage, which are essential for a sustainable future.

The PD project aims for the development of novel models addressing the upscaling of molecular processes happening along interfaces in porous materials using kinetic theory. The objective is to advance digital tools for material development used for the prediction and optimisation of flow processes, such as multiphase flow and reactive transport, in porous media.

Currently, most digital models addressing this topic are built upon arbitrarily set fitting parameters, for example, shape factors, reactivity indices and contact angles. These fitting parameters are used to bypass the lack of an adequate representation of the structural and chemical material characteristics. The work in our group focusses on the characterization of this properties using different nano- and molecular measuring techniques such as AFM and iGC. Your task will be to integrate the output of such measurements into existing computational frameworks. Within this project, you will collaborate with a team of experimentalists and computationalists addressing this topic in context of the various applications and publications mentioned above support PhD students in this context.

You will become a member of the Energy Technology team at the Mechanical Engineering Department with access to a range of different state of the art lab facilities and get the opportunity to collaborate within the international porous media community, including partners from academia and industry. Together we will work on a career development plan that supports your own ambitions in academia or industry.

The work is funded by the DeepNL programme.