PACM Colloquium: Martin Bazant, MIT

Electrokinetic Control of Interfacial Instabilities

This talk will describe three examples of interfacial dynamics – viscous fingering, deionization shock propagation, and dendritic electrodeposition – whose stability can be controlled by electrokinetic phenomena in charged porous media, as evidenced by both theory and experiments.  Potential applications include electrically enhanced oil recovery, water purification by shock electrodialysis, and energy storage with metal batteries.

Martin Z. Bazant is the E. G. Roos (1944) Professor of Chemical Engineering and Mathematics and Executive Officer of the Department of Chemical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  After a PhD in Physics at Harvard  (1997), he joined the MIT faculty in Mathematics (1998) and then in Chemical Engineering (2008).  He is a Fellow of the International Society of Electrochemistry and of the Royal Society of Chemistry (FRSC) and winner of the 2015 Kuznetsov Prize in Theoretical Electrochemistry.  He also serves as the Chief Scientific Advisor for Saint Gobain Ceramics and Plastics, Nortboro R&D Center.