The Concrete Sustainability Hub and UMI @ MIT presents
Date: Friday, January 31, 2014 Time: 3:00-4:00 pm Place: 1-131
Dr. Benjamin Rotenberg CNRS Researcher PHENIX Laboratory (Physical chemistry of electrolytes and interfacial nanosystems) Universite Pierre et Marie Curie (Paris, France) “Multiscale modelling of transport through charged porous media”
Abstract:The transport of fluids through charged porous media plays an important role in many industrial environmental contexts. For example, one can cite membranes for water treatment, ionic liquids in porous carbon electrodes for supercapacitors, or water of (beneficial or toxic) solutes transport in soils or in the underground. From the physical chemist point of view, the difficulty to understand these systems stems from the complexity of the interactions at play, from the molecular scale to that of the macroscopic sample: reactivity of surface sites, ion solvation in the bulk and at interfaces, wettability, hydrodynamics under nano-confinement, electrokinetic effects, etc. The transport of ions near charged interfaces and their sorption involves length and time scales spanning several orders of magnitude. From the modelling point of view, the challenge posed by these multiple scales can only be addressed within a multiscale strategy, i.e. not only by modelling on different scales, but also by bridging the various levels of descriptions. In this talk, I will illustrate the recent work in our laboratory on the case of clay minerals, in the contexts of the geological disposal of radioactive waste and of carbon dioxide sequestration, with examples ranging from DFT calculations to mesoscopic approaches, via molecular simulations. I will discuss in particular the merits of the various levels for the description of electrokinetic phenomena, i.e. the coupling between electric and hydrodynamic effects which develop at the interface between a charged surface and a solution.
Short Bio
Benjamin Rotenberg is a CNRS researcher in the PHENIX laboratory (Physical chemistry of electrolytes and interfacial nanosystems) at Université Pierre et Marie Curie (Paris). After graduating from the Ecole Normale Supérieure, he did his PhD with Pierre Turq in Paris followed by a post-doc with Daan Frenkel in Amsterdam. Since his hiring at CNRS in 2008, he has been an invited researcher in the group of David Chandler at the University of California, Berkeley, and an invited professor at the University of Barcelona. His research is focused on the multiscale modelling of charged porous materials, with applications in the field of Energy. In 2013, he received 3 prizes, including the Prix Michel Gouilloud Schlumberger from the French Academy of Sciences.