Underground hydrogen storage in porous formations (UHSP) is emerging as a critical technology for large-scale energy buffering, enabling TWh-scale capacity, geographic flexibility, and cost advantages over surface storage. However, unlike conventional hydrocarbon reservoirs, UHSP involves cyclic injection and withdrawal of hydrogen, imposing repeated stress variations on reservoir rocks over...
When CO₂ is injected to induce fractures in rock, the resulting fractures tend to be more complex, and the breakdown pressure is generally lower than when water is injected. This study presents numerical experiments that reveal lower breakdown pressures under supercritical CO₂ injection and demonstrate that fracture paths are more strongly influenced by pre-existing weak interfaces due to...
Ground surface settlement is a common phenomenon in urban tunneling through layered soil–rock systems, particularly where bedrock faults intersect the tunnel and connect to overlying soils. This study employs a fully coupled hydro‑mechanical finite element model to quantify how stratigraphy and fault properties jointly govern the magnitude, spatial distribution, and temporal evolution of...
Coupled fluid flow and mechanical deformation play a central role in the behaviour of porous media whose internal topology evolves under load, spanning applications from geomechanics and energy systems to soft biological and bio-inspired materials. Despite extensive advances in poromechanics, many numerical approaches still rely on continuum assumptions that inadequately capture how...
Geological Carbon Storage (GCS) involves long-term, megaton-scale CO2 injection that induces coupled fluid flow and mechanical deformation over spatial scales of tens of square kilometers. In contrast, most experimental investigations of poromechanical behavior are confined to centimeter-scale samples, limiting their ability to capture representative hydro-mechanical interactions relevant to...
Unconsolidated sandstones form high-quality reservoirs and aquifers, playing a key role in subsurface energy activities. Hydraulic fracturing in these formations is known to be governed by plastic shear localization and particle transport; however, the exact mechanisms by which these processes operate remain poorly understood. As a result, accurately predicting the onset of fracturing, as well...
The CarbonSAFE Project aims to demonstrate large-scale CO2 storage in the United States, using deep characterization wells to support commercial hub for tens of millions of tonnes of anthropogenic CO2. Large-scale injection of CO2 into the Earth’s crust requires an understanding of the multiphase flow properties of high-pressure CO2 displacing brine. In this perspective, the main source of...
Understanding gas transport mechanisms in low-permeability geomaterials is essential for a wide range of geo-energy and subsurface engineering applications, including underground gas storage, CO₂ sequestration, hydrogen storage, and the disposal of nuclear waste in deep geological repositories [1]. In clay-rich porous media such as bentonite barriers and argillaceous host rocks, gas migration...
Carbon dioxide (CO2) and hydrogen (H2) storage in geological formations are two key approaches to reducing carbon emissions, with capillary trapping being the most efficient mechanism for ensuring storage security. Understanding the behaviours of immiscible fluid-fluid displacement in porous media is crucial for optimizing trapping efficiency. Previous studies have primarily focused on...
The storage of hydrogen, produced via water electrolysis, in a cementitious cavity offers a solution to the overproduction of electricity from wind farms. But chemical degradation, structural damage, loss of mechanical strength, and an increased leak risk could be caused by hydrogen infiltration into the materials. It is necessary to predict and prevent these issues to ensure safe and...
Characterizing the dynamics of multi-cellular tumor spheroids (MCTS) within biomimetic environments is essential for identifying the physical factors affecting cancer proliferation and invasive behavior. While Cellular Capsule Technology (CCT) serves as a robust tool for monitoring these dynamics through microfluidic encapsulation, current mathematical frameworks are limited by their focus on...
The growing complexity of coupled flow-deformation processes in geosystems calls for experimental methods that resolve hydro-mechanical responses with spatial and temporal detail beyond the reach of traditional instrumentation. Conventional element-level laboratory tests rely on point-based sensors and therefore cannot resolve how deformation is distributed along a specimen. As a result, tests...
Deep geological disposal of high-level radioactive waste relies on the long-term integrity of bentonite-based engineered barriers. However, predicting their performance remains a challenge due to the complex evolution of the pore structure under different environmental conditions, which directly controls their swelling and sealing capacity. Existing stress-strain constitutive models often...
The capillary entry pressure of a porous medium is the applied pressure at which a non-wetting fluid will first invade the pore space by displacing the wetting fluid from the largest pore throats. For a rigid porous medium, the entry pressure is a characteristic of the two fluids, the solid material, and the pore structure. For a soft porous medium, however, the applied pressure will also...
Soft porous media often exhibit heterogeneous structures. For instance, biological tissues can be composed of multiple layers characterised by distinct mechanical and fluid-flow properties; similarly, in tissue engineering, multilayer scaffolds are known to promote cell survival and proliferation.
Under periodic loading—particularly common in these systems (e.g. due to cardiac pulsations,...
Soft porous media consisting of assemblies of biological objects are common in many industrial and natural situations. They are often confined, as in the case of yeast clogs trapped in a filtration membrane, or human tumor cells in the case of e.g. bone cancer. Whereas this confinement and the possible friction induced at the boundaries of the porous media are not addressed by the well-known...
