RESEARCH INTERESTS
Towards sustainable energy and environment: Developing cross-scale science to connect molecular- and meso-scale studies for pore-to-field and process-scale applications to advance sustainable energy and environmental technologies
- Multiphase reaction chemistry
- Fluid transport, reactivity and thermodynamics in extreme environments including confinement
- In-operando determination of structure-property relationships of complex materials in multi-phase environments
- Closing the elemental cycles through multi-scale hybrid integration of the sustainable recovery of fuels and resources with the use and permanent storage of environmentally hazardous waste streams
Key application areas: directed synthesis of clean energy carriers (e.g., H2) with integrated separation of acid gases, natural and engineered materials for separation, storage and recovery of gases such as CO2 and CH4, advanced carbonate and clay chemistry and morphology, natural and engineered colloidal systems, valorization of industrial residues, metal recovery from natural and engineered substrates, functionalized materials for energy conversion and recovery, directed recovery and storage of fluids in subsurface environments
Techniques: operando synchrotron methods such as ultra-small angle, small-angle, and wide-angle (or diffraction) X-ray and neutron scattering; X-ray reflectivity; grazing incidence small and wide angle X-ray scattering; total scattering; X-ray absorption fine structure; high performance molecular dynamics simulations using LAMMPS; laboratory scale techniques such as BET, thermogravimetric analyses, total inorganic and organic carbon analyses, X-ray powder diffraction, inductively coupled plasma – atomic emission spectroscopy (ICP-AES), gas chromatography, ion chromatography, gas adsorption and desorption measurements; design and construction of laboratory scale high pressure and high temperature batch and flow reactor systems for materials testing and for integration with X-ray and neutron scattering and tomography measurements.