When it will come to instructing, observing is a critical to believing, or at the very least understanding.
That’s is the guiding basic principle of a new class, 1.079 (Rock-on-a-Chip), dedicated to checking out multiphase flow in porous media.
“This program is an prospect to train this topic in a absolutely unique way, by visualizing the physics of flow,” says instructor Ruben Juanes, the ARCO Affiliate Professor in Electrical power Scientific studies.
Juanes released 1.079 in the spring of 2017, looking for to kick-start an energy assets track inside the Section of Civil and Environmental Engineering. “The class performs a extremely pleasant position in the curriculum, filling a gap in a topic that is crucial to several energy systems,” he says.
Flows in porous media occur into enjoy in a vary of true-planet apps, from oil and fuel recovery and groundwater source administration to seismic exercise mapping and energy storage technological know-how. These flows are routinely multiphase, composed of gases, solids, and liquids in various mixes. For illustration, hydrocarbon reservoirs simultaneously host drinking water, oil, and fuel and fuel cells function a porous layer up coming to the cathode where by drinking water vapor may well condense into liquid drinking water.
Having said that, the processes by which liquids and gases go underground normally acquire area out of sight. Rainwater infiltrates soil, displacing air. Oil and drinking water contend as they seep via rock reservoirs. It has been complicated to observe and capture in scientific detail what Juanes calls “the great physics and chemistry of multiphase flows.”
But recently, Juanes figured out a way of elucidating these subterranean processes. Utilizing 3-D printing and methods borrowed from the field of microfluidics, he produced a multiphase flow laboratory on a chip.
The system is made up of a microfluidic flow mobile patterned with vertical posts applying soft lithography, sandwiched involving two slender layers of a clear polymer. When a person fluid is released to displace one more, the chip permits immediate visualization of elementary physical mechanisms at the scale of real rock and soil pores. Juanes can now analyze in vivid shut-up the crucial attributes and porous media circumstances that hamper, or hasten, underground flows.
What Juanes calls a “new tactic to an previous problem” proves specifically powerful in the classroom.
“With clear porous media, you can show the course of action of oil recovery, filtration of drinking water, extraction of gases,” he says. “You just can’t seriously comprehend these apps with no awareness of the physics, and right here, an picture is truly worth a thousand phrases.”
Lubna Barghouty SM ’17, whose graduate investigate centered on predicting the flow of oil from rock reservoirs made up of both equally oil and drinking water, calls 1.079 a “one-of-a-kind class.”
“I had been looking at about the principles and striving to imagine these phenomena, and lastly I was equipped to see them,” she says.
Rafael Villamor Lora, a graduate college student in civil engineering and geomechanics, is researching rock permeability and fluid flow within rock fractures. He says he found that 1.079 provided “a special tactic to presenting extremely complicated physics, creating it distinct and understandable.”
Juanes divides class time involving lectures centered on principle and labs that introduced principle to daily life, a blend that pupils found both equally intellectually difficult and sensible.
“I enjoy experimenting and carrying out things hands-on,” says Omar Al-Dajani SM ’16, a petroleum engineer for Saudi Aramco now pursuing a doctoral diploma in civil and environmental engineering. But in some cases his experiments failed. “It was astounding how Professor Juanes could modify a number of things on the fly so the experiment would operate correctly,” he says. “He goes via derivations, formulates issues in a extremely exquisite way, and will come up with the suitable alternative for what ever difficulty will come up in the lab.”
Barghouty says she was anxious when she initially learned that she would be accountable for fabricating her possess lab instruments.
“We did complete experiments from A to Z, which include reducing sheets of acrylic glass with lasers and applying 3-D printers to etch pores in these chips,” she says. “I am now self-assured that I have the skills necessary for experimental do the job and that I can use all those expertise to other kinds of investigate.”
Lab-on-a-chip experiments that demanded hours of preparing could possibly acquire mere moments to operate. Just one experiment shown the ability of capillary forces. Soon after filling their microfluidic chips with a fluid, pupils flipped them 180 degrees, expecting the fluid to flow down in response to gravity.
“In my mobile, the fluid hung, and my jaw dropped,” recollects Al-Dajani. Surface rigidity created the fluid adhere to the several small posts within the chip, fabricated to simulate rock pores. When he added a drop of soap, instantly the area rigidity disappeared and the fluid dropped. “We observed the physics in action, the competition involving gravity and capillary forces, which also can take area within oil reservoirs,” he says.
Many labs showcased Juanes’s investigate pursuits. “I asked pupils to modify the wettability of the microfluidic mobile and to search at displacement of multiphase flow less than unique wetting circumstances,” says Juanes. Knowledge and altering wettability — a evaluate of a substance’s attraction to or repulsion of drinking water — is essential to fluid extraction apps.
“There are methods wettability could be modulated to get well extra oil and fuel in current reservoirs,” Juanes notes. “There is a big margin for improvement in both fracking and typical drilling.”
Whilst he hopes to travel property the true-planet apps of laboratory do the job, Juanes intends for the class to attain a broader pedagogical aim.
“When you accomplish an experiment not knowing the outcome, you are forced to make perception of what comes about, specifically something unpredicted,” he says. “Moments like these captivate your attention, seriously enabling you to dig deep and supplying you a improved understanding of physics at enjoy.”
The Rock-on-a-Chip class was designed with funding from the S.D. Bechtel, Jr. Basis. It will be an elective for the energy studies insignificant starting up in 2018.
This report appears in the Autumn 2017 issue of Energy Futures, the magazine of the MIT Electrical power Initiative.
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