CERE researchers receive Villum Experiment grants

Press release https://veluxfoundations.dk/en/villum-experiment-2022

Details of the projects granted:

Is Water a Two-State liquid?

This Villum Experiment project is expected to start early 2023. The project will involve one post-doctoral researcher supervised by Georgios M. Kontogeorgis and Xiaodong Liang. The goal of this project is to investigate whether the combination of the two-state concept and the advanced thermodynamic models based on the SAFT framework can describe the anomalous properties of water and the challenges stated below.

Water is of huge relevance in chemistry, biology and engineering. While much is known about water, its structure and properties, it is also well-known that many of its properties are “anomalous” in the sense that no other liquids behave like this. Many of these anomalous properties are of thermodynamic origin (density maximum and minimum heat capacity with respect to temperature). On one hand, it has been known as a concept for over a century that water may consist of two “states” in some form of equilibrium with each other. But it has been during the last 20 years with the advanced experimental, simulation and theoretical studies that this theory has regained serious attention. On the other hand, the most advanced thermodynamic models are incapable of simultaneously capturing the anomalies of water and complex phase equilibria of water containing systems. A complete and successful approach should describe both the anomalous properties of water and the phase behavior of aqueous systems.

Soil remediation by salinity waves

An amount of nearly two million kr. was granted to Postdoc Dr. Tian Wang by the Villum Foundation to perform experiments in the framework of the Villum Experiment programme. The project aims to apply brines with different salinity in attempting to remediate the soil from colloidal contaminants (like plastic particles). The idea is to use the salinity waves (alternating high and low salinity, or high-low-high concentrations of specific ions). It is expected to be a simple, cost-effective, and energy-saving method, which can minimize the overall environmental impact of soil treatment. The fact that the particles can move in the capillaries under the action of varying salinity has previously been confirmed in microfluidics experiments. The new experimental program has to verify the possibility to clean the ground from multiple contaminants in the experiments performed with the application of the 2D and 3D microfluidics, on the glass beads and sand packs. The project will done in collaboration with Assoc. Prof. Alexander Shapiro from CERE (Chemical Engineering) and Prof. Simon Andersen at the Danish Offshore Technology Center.

Figure. Schematic illustration of the project.