People
The Juanes Research Group is research-home to a diverse group of postdocs, grad students, undergrads, and visiting scholars.
Postdocs
I am a postdoctoral associate in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. My research interests include the physics of multiphase flow in porous media, numerical analysis, and computational fluid dynamics. My current work focuses on pattern formation in immiscible displacements.
I study the coupled flow and mechanical deformation in sediments and rocks, and their effect on natural processes such as hydraulic fracturing and viscous fingering. I develop grain-scale models, which are employed in numerical simulations. Particularly, I seek to model hydrate bearing sediments, focusing on methane transport and its role in the global carbon cycle and the seafloor stability.
Graduate Students
I am a first-year graduate student in Civil and Environmental Engineering. My research focus is on characterizing and modeling unstable flows in a hydrocarbon displacement process. Waterflooding an oil reservoir to recover additional oil is one such example, where viscous and capillary fingers may develop as instabilities on the displacement front and these fingers may reduce the ultimate recovery.
I am a second-year Environmental Engineering (MIT Course 1) MS/PhD student. My research interest is multiphase flow through fractured geologic media. Currently, I am working on the application of Continuous Time Random Walk (CTRW) to effectively capture macroscopic transport in random lattice models.
Jihoon Kim
Jihoon studies the stability of iterative schemes for coupled fluid flow and geomechanics.
I am a third-year PhD student in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. My research interests are fluid mechanics and applied mathematics, generally, and the physics of multiphase flow in porous media, specifically. My current work involves the theoretical modeling of various aspects of the geological storage of CO2.
I am a first-year graduate student in the Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering at MIT. I obtained my MSc degree at Imperial College London, where I worked on the stability of falling fluid films. My research interests are in the physics of multiphase flows in porous media. Currently, I am working on anomalous transport in Scale-Free Networks.
I am a second-year MS-PhD student student in Civil and Environmental Engineering. My research focuses on computer modeling to estimate the global inventory of methane hydrate. We seek an expression that captures the large-scale behavior of methane gas and hydrate below the sea floor, including capillary invasion and flow in fractures. The natural gas trapped inside ice-like hydrates may have important impacts on world energy resources and climate change, and in order to evaluate the associated opportunities and risks, we need a better understanding of where and how hydrates form and dissociate.
I am a second-year graduate student in Civil and Environmental Engineering. The theme of my research is the effect of multiphase flow on CO2 sequestration. I am currently investigating this effect using two approaches. The first is theoretical, and applies at the scale of sedimentary basins—I develop basin-scale continuum models that account for multiphase flow phenomena, and I apply them to sedimentary basins throughout the US. The second approach is experimental, and applies at the core scale—I perform experiments to study pattern formation during immiscible multiphase flow.
Alumni
Sebastien Matringe, PhD 2008: Mixed finite element methods for discretization and streamline tracing
Antone Jain, MS 2009: Preferential mode of gas invasion in sediments: grain-scale mechanistic model of coupled multiphase fluid flow and sediment mechanics
Reena Bajaj, MS 2009: An unstructured finite volume simulator for multiphase flow through fractured-porous media
Francois-Xavier Dub, MS 2008: Variational multiscale mixed finite element methods
Yingxia Wang, UROP 2009: Experimental research on viscous fingering
Michelle Bentivegna, UROP 2009: Experimental research on CO2 capillary trapping
Juan Angel Rodriguez, UROP 2008-2009: Analytical models for the dissolution of trapped CO2
Aaron Thom, UROP 2008: Drainage experiments in linear porous media
Ariel Esposito, UROP 2007: Site selection for carbon dioxide sequestration in deep aquifers
Visitors (current and past)
Nicola Castelletto, PhD student at the University of Padova
Prof. Marco Dentz, Institute of Environmental Assessment and Water Research (IDAEA-CSIC)
Dr. Juan Jose Hidalgo, Universidad Politecnica de Catalunya
Prof. Ignacio Romero, Universidad Politecnica de Madrid
Prof. Jan Nordbotten, University of Bergen / Princeton University
