This position has been filled!
The Faculty of Geosciences and Environment at University of Lausanne is offering a PhD scholarship on the topic “Geophysical signatures of spreading and mixing” starting preferably before July 1, 2017.
The project is funded by the Marie-Sklodowska-Curie Innovative Training Network “ENIGMA – EU Training Network for In situ imaGing of dynaMic processes in heterogeneous subsurfAce environments” within the Horizon 2020 Programme of the European Commission.
ENIGMA is a consortium of high profile universities, research institutions and companies located in France, Spain, Germany, Switzerland, Belgium, Denmark, Sweden, USA and UK, and will train 15 PhD students in total (Early Stage Researcher, ESR).
This particular PhD (ESR PhD 9) will be based at Institute of Earth Sciences at University of Lausanne with research stays at CNRS Rennes and CSIC Barcelona.
Project description
Geophysical time-lapse inversions provide upscaled estimates of temporal changes in bulk properties that may provide constraints on dispersion (spreading), but they have never been used to-date to infer statistics of mixing, which controls (fast) chemical reactions. We suggest that simultaneous acquisition of geophysical data and concentration fields by means of millifluidic experiments will enable novel and fundamental insights that will ultimately influence hydrogeophysical research at the field scale. Millifluidic experiments in artificial media of varying complexity (developed by ESR 12) will provide high-resolution images of the concentration field during tracer experiments. Simultaneous acquisitions of geophysical data (representing effective upscaled properties at the scale of the sample) in the form of electrical resistance and self-potential (i.e., the electro-diffusive contribution) will be influenced by pore scale and mesoscale heterogeneities of the salinity and liquid phase. These combined data sets will be used to develop new theory and experimentally demonstrate how spreading and mixing of solutes in heterogeneous porous media, manifest themselves in geophysical data. These findings can then be used to make inferences about the statistics (not the actual salinity distribution) of spreading and mixing in porous media.
Contact
Niklas Linde, Institute of Earth Sciences at University of Lausanne
Department/Location: Faculty of Geosciences and Environment at University of Lausanne