Biography
My name is Erik Huber and I am from Fulton, NY. I am completing my 4th year of study in Mechanical Engineering here at Cornell University. I am a little bit older than the majority of my colleagues because I earned a Master’s degree elsewhere prior to arriving at Cornell. After attending Alfred State College (Engineering Science ’06) and the University at Buffalo (Mechanical Engineering ’08), I went to Columbia University in August 2008 to pursue my Ph.D. However, after two years of funding struggles I was forced to leave the program but had passed enough classes to earn a M.S. in Mechanical Engineering.
The study of energy and fluid mechanics had always been a passion of mine. At Columbia I worked on microfluidic algal bioreactors; this involved fabricating microscale tanks to grow algae in precisely controlled environments in an effort to maximize lipid production for biofuel conversion. I took my transfer to Cornell as an opportunity to change research from the micro scale to the macro scale, and I was accepted to join the NSF Earth Energy IGERT under the direction of Professor Jeff Tester to work on carbon sequestration modeling. This research has been very rewarding and I have been able to travel to Alabama to view, first-hand, one of the only carbon sequestration site in the country and to speak to the handful of people in the world who study issues related to CO2 sequestration.
On a personal level, I have always had a passion for teaching. My career goal is to be a professor. Throughout my academic career I have been a tutor and supplemental instructor in physics, calculus and fluid mechanics. These experiences have reinforced my desire to be in front of a chalkboard… if I can ever finish my doctorate, that is. In my free time I like to jog, watch sports and I am an avid soccer player.
Research
In the wake of the green revolution, I consider my research to be more of a contingency plan to help bridge the gap between the complete zero emission energy source future we envision and the amount of zero emission energy sources we actually implement. I study the fluid mechanics and mass transport phenomenon of carbon sequestration. In simple terms, the idea of carbon sequestration is relatively straightforward: capture CO2 from the exhaust of a power plant (before it is vented to the atmosphere), compress the gas until it becomes a fluid, and then inject this fluid deep within the earth in hopes that it does not resurface. However, in addition to the challenges associated with capturing the CO2 from the exhaust, we also have difficulty predicting the fate of the CO2 once it is injected into the ground, and this is where my research comes in to play. I work on this part of the problem: predicting what happens to the CO2 after you inject it into the earth. I use analytic and numerical models to solve for the CO2 flow field and I calculate how fast the CO2 dissolves into the subsurface water. I also help design injection strategies to reduce the dissolution time, to help reduce the likelihood that the CO2 will return to the surface. One such method involves periodically injecting CO2 and brine to create rings of CO2 in the rock formation. This results in a drastic reduction in dissolution time because of reduced distance over which diffusion must occur (see Figure).
Recently, I have started researching the mass transport characteristics of cap rock. Cap rock refers to the layers of rock located above a sequestration reservoir that are assumed to be impermeable. More precisely, cap rock is much less permeable than the injection reservoir below. However, I have been studying the mass transfer properties of these nanoporous materials to quantify the effective permeability of these structures as well as the possibility of vapor formation within the porous matrix.
