Speaker
Description
Meso-structured, porous materials exhibit favorable charge, heat, and mass transport properties and are used as absorbers, heat exchangers, insulators, reaction sites, electrodes and/or reactants in a wide variety of applications ranging from chemical processing, (photo)electrochemistry, combustion, filtering, to concentrated solar reactor technology. The transport properties of these materials largely depend on the meso-structure of the material and significantly affect its combined transport and ultimately the performance of the device. For example, electrochemical reactors for CO2 reduction show significant variation in activity and selectrivity dependent on the (anistropic) mesostructure of the gas diffusion electrode or porous thermal storage devices made of phase change material show significant variation in capacity and discharge time dependent on the mesostructure. In-depth understanding of the structure-property relation followed by pore-engineering of the materials used in the applications is therefore of fundamental importance to further improvements in performance. I will discuss decoupled and coupled pore-level numerical approaches for transport characterization and estimation of the local heterogeneity, discuss the use of neural networks for rapid performance assessment and optimization, and inverse experimental-numerical approaches for the characterization of the transport in porous media in extreme conditions.
