Electrokinetic characterization of conducting two-phase flows in model porous media

In the past decades computational models have become increasingly more important, because they can give microscopic insights into systems that are inaccessible experimentally. Lattice Boltzmann method (LBM)  is one of the several existing models to simulate fluid flow in porous geometries, and it is a key model in this project.

Modeling real world applications is typically more cumbersome than describing the flow of simple fluids, since they often involve the presence of multiple fluid phases or electrolyte solutions. Within LBM, there exists several extensions for including a multiphase flow description, but the coupling with an electrolyte, typically governed by the Poisson-Nernst-Planck equation, is still a challenging task.

In this project, we want to bridge the gap beetween particle based simulations and continuum methods by developing a easily extendable, predictive electrokinetic multiphase flow model for complex geometries.  For this purpose, special interest is devoted to engineer a wetting model, which would allow us to study the influence of surface effects on the electrolytic multiphase flow characteristics in porous media.

In addition to that, we are also interested in developing a direct coupling between the electrokinetics model and charged polymers. This would allow to use both descriptions, the particle based and the continuum model, in the same simulation and thus open up the possibility to efficiently perform simulation studies in the field of electrokinetic drug release with nanogels or the study of protein dynamics in electrolyte solutions in varying pH conditions.

Furthermore, we will try to apply machine learning techniques to speed up our simulations with feature extractions or attempt to fully replace the simulation by predicting transport properties based on geometry data.