Geological Lab-on-a-Chip for Salt Precipitation in Deep Saline Aquifers

Geologic storage of carbon dioxide (CO2) into deep
saline aquifers is a promising strategy for mitigation
of global atmospheric CO2 levels-a main cause of
climate change. These aquifers have the capacity
to safely store significant amounts of CO2 and are
available worldwide. As such, reaction dynamics and
multiphase transport accompanying CO2 injection in
deep aquifers are important to understanding CO2
sequestration processes and therefore they have
been extensively studied. Despite the comprehensive
findings, there are still urgent needs for understanding
of interactions between injected CO2 and
resident fluids since these interactions could determine
the total CO2 storage rate and capacity. The
objective of this study is to investigate fundamental
physics of water evaporation at different salinities under the CO2-rich environment. Microfluidic techniques
visualize and quantify evaporation behavior
of water in real-time in a simple 1D microchannel
geometry. The detailed CO2-water interactions and
underlying physics will be discussed.