Yashar Mehmani
Pennsylvania State University, PA·Engineering·Early-career
Rocks underground are full of tiny connected pores, and much of the energy transition depends on what fluids do inside them: storing carbon dioxide until it turns to stone, stashing hydrogen made from surplus wind and solar power, drawing heat from geothermal reservoirs. The same pore-scale physics governs engineered porous materials like concrete, fuel cell electrodes and battery electrodes.
- Fields
Engineering
Earth & Environmental Science
Materials Science
- Topics
carbon mineralization
reactive cracking
carbon dioxide storage
- Grants
- 3 known grants, through Jul 2029
What they work on
- Map the regimes that determine whether volume-expanding mineral growth cracks porous rock open, exposing fresh reactive surface, or instead seals the pore space, using bench-scale experiments with microscale models coupling flow, reaction and fracture.
- Assess the carbonation potential of candidate minerals and whether reaction-driven cracking can be harnessed to promote, or suppressed to limit, carbon mineralization at practical timescales and quantities.
- Determine what controls the spatial distribution of trapped hydrogen and cushion-gas bubbles in porous rock during cyclic seasonal injection and withdrawal, through combined experiments and modeling.
- Quantify how bubble sizes, shapes and compositions evolve by Ostwald ripening, the diffusive mass exchange in which small bubbles shrink and large ones grow, and how collective equilibration alters storage capacity and flow resistance.
- Establish a mechanistic understanding of deformation and failure in brittle porous media by anchoring microscale simulations to controlled laboratory experiments.
- Accelerate direct microscale simulation of porous materials using physics-informed mathematical approximations, enabling optimization and uncertainty quantification on geometrically complex pore structures.
More about the research
The common difficulty is that classical models treat porous rock as a smooth, averaged continuum and so cannot explain what happens at the scale of individual pores and grains, while simulating every pore directly is extremely slow. The projects here combine controlled bench-scale experiments with microscale computational models to pin down the governing physics of how porous materials crack, how gas bubbles get trapped, and how minerals grow, and to make such simulations fast enough to be useful.
Why it matters
Storing carbon dioxide as solid mineral and storing hydrogen in deep porous rock are both central to decarbonizing energy, and both hinge on pore-scale processes that are poorly understood. Knowing when mineral growth cracks rock open rather than sealing it could inform site selection for carbon storage and the design of concrete that strengthens as it absorbs carbon dioxide; understanding bubble trapping and ripening could help operators choose hydrogen storage sites and cushion gases and predict how much hydrogen they can get back. Faster, better-grounded models of how porous materials fail could also support safer geothermal and storage operations and the design of fuel cell, battery and civil infrastructure components.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Mechanistic Understanding of Reaction-Driven Fracturing for Carbon Mineralization
NSF · Aug 2026 – Jul 2029
CAREER: An Integrated Computational and Experimental Framework to Understand Deformation and Failure of Porous Materials
NSF · Aug 2022 – Jul 2027
CAS-Climate: Bubble generation and ripening in underground hydrogen storage
NSF · May 2024 – Apr 2027
Closest labs
Collin Sutton
Colorado School of Mines, CO·Earth & Environmental Science
Develop a reduced-order, bipartite graph framework that captures the essential flow, solute transport and geochemical reactions in fractured rock without the cost of full-physics simulation.
Erdal Ozkan
Colorado School of Mines, CO·Engineering
Test whether CO2 at oil-wall interfaces and its gradient along pore walls control oil-CO2 transport in nanopores, using membrane and real rock core experiments with molecular and continuum simulations.
Chen Zhu
Indiana University, IN·Earth & Environmental Science
Determine how mineral dissolution and the formation of new minerals are coupled during carbon mineralization, using multiple isotope tracer experiments (Si, K, Sr, Ca, Mg, Fe, C) on crushed basalt.
The school
Pennsylvania State University: 60 labs on PI Pages, $1.3B a year on research, 743 research doctorates a year.
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