Date: February 24, 2017
Time: 12:00 p.m. -
Location: Maeder Hall, Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment
Young-Shin Jun, a professor at the Washington University in St. Louis, will speak on the topic of “Elucidating Nucleation and Nanoscale Interfacial Reactions at the Water-Energy Nexus” at Princeton University’s Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment. The lecture is co-sponsored by the Andlinger Center and the civil and environmental engineering department. Before the lecture, lunch will be served at noon in the lobby of Maeder Hall, the Andlinger Center. The lecture starts at 12:30 p.m.
ABSTRACT
Climate change and rapid socioeconomic development are stressing our potable water resources. This stress gets worse when we consider the coupling with energy systems. Water is used in energy and electricity generation, and, reciprocally, energy is required to produce potable or usable clean water. Thus, unavoidably, water and energy are interdependent. In many engineering processes at the water-energy nexus, we often observe calcium carbonate (CaCO3) formation, which plays important roles in carbon dioxide utilization and mineralization, pipeline scaling, water purification membrane processes, and energy-related subsurface operations. In this talk, I will introduce our recent work on in situ experimental observations of heterogeneous nucleation of CaCO3 on quartz at different salinities and temperatures. The nucleation kinetics were investigated using synchrotron-based in situ grazing incidence small angle X-ray scattering and complementary water, interface, and solid characterization methods. Through this experimental work and by applying classical nucleation theory, we obtained the effective interfacial energy (α) controlling the nucleation process for each salinity, as well as the thermodynamic and kinetic activation nucleation barriers. With these newly obtained thermodynamic and kinetic parameters, reactive transport models can include nucleation as an explicit step and can better predict the crucial fate and transport of contaminants and nutrients in the environment. The results can also be applicable to controlling scale formation in pipelines and to designing effective foulant-resistant desalination membranes. Thus, in the later part of the talk, I will briefly introduce how our improved understanding of nucleation and nanoscale interfacial reactions can assist our efforts to maintain sustainability at the water-energy nexus.
BIO
Dr. Young-Shin Jun is the Harold D. Jolley Career Development Associate Professor of Energy, Environmental & Chemical Engineering (EECE) and the EECE Director of Graduate Studies at Washington University in St. Louis, where she leads the Environmental NanoChemistry Laboratory. Dr. Jun received a 2011 U.S. National Science Foundation CAREER award and a 2008 Ralph E. Powe Junior Faculty Enhancement Award. She serves on the Advisory Board of Environmental Science: Processes & Impacts and the Editorial Board of Geochemical Transactions. She now serves on the American Chemical Society’s Committee on Science, and she was the 2016 Division Chair of the American Chemical Society’s Geochemistry Division. Prof. Jun has been named a 2015 Kavli Fellow by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and a 2016 Frontier of Engineering Fellow by the U.S. National Academy of Engineering. She received her bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Ewha Womans University (South Korea), holds masters and PhD degrees in Environmental Chemistry from Harvard University, and conducted her postdoctoral research at the University of California-Berkeley/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.