DrBrankoBijeljic

• Principal Research Fellow, Imperial College
• PhD, Chemical Engineering, Imperial College, 2000

Recent Measures of Esteem

KEYNOTE TALKS

• at the BEATS (Beamline for Tomography at SESAME) European Union funded inaugural workshop at the Cyprus Institute as a part of The SESAME international centre for scientific research, a collaboration between 8 countries under the auspices of UNESCO, 27-28 June 2019.
•  at the Inaugural workshop of Norwegian Chapter of Interpore, Trondheim, Norway, 18 October 2017.
• at the 20th International Conference on Computational Methods in Water Resources (CMWR2014), Stuttgart, 9-13 June 2014;
• at the Porous Media Process Modelling (PMPM) workshop on 3D Imaging and Applications to Geosciences, Dundee, 7-8 October 2013.
• invited talks at the prestigious international conferences such as American Geophysical Union (AGU),  American Physical Society (APS), American Chemical Society (ACS), INTERPORE,  Goldschmidt, and European Association of Geoscientists and Engineers (EAGE).

EDITORIAL / CONFERENCES

• Associate Editor of Water Resources Research,  since 2019.
• Editor of the Special Issue of the Journal of Contaminant Hydrology, “Advances in experimental techniques, validation of modelling tools and uncertainty in predictions from pore to field scale”, 2018.
•  Editor of the Special Issue of the Journal of Contaminant Hydrology, “Reactive Transport in the Subsurface: Mixing, Spreading and Reaction in Heterogeneous Media”, 2011.
• “Reactive Transport in Porous Media”, conference chair at Imperial College co-organised with the Magnetic Resonance Research Centre from University of Cambridge, 8-9 September 2016.
• serving on the Scientific Committee at the 21st Computational Methods in Water Resources (CMWR) conference, Toronto, Canada, 20-24 June 2016.

Research Interests

The principal focus of my research is Fluid Flow in Porous Media. My research addresses key global challenges in the 21st century, namely securing sustainable access to energy and water for a growing population, while avoiding dangerous climate change.

My main research areas have been subsurface carbon storage, contaminant transport, and improved oil recovery. The aim is to transform our current understanding of flow, transport and reaction in porous media by developing pore-scale imaging, image analysis, and modelling tools.

The main research themes are:

A) Developing SAFE Carbon STORAGE AND IMPROVED HYDROCARBON RECOVERY Technologies in SUBSURFACE POROUS MEDIA

Pore-scale imaging of flow and reactive transport in carbon-dioxide storage and hydrocarbon recovery (both on micro-CT scanners and synchrotron sources at Diamond Light Source, Didcot, UK and Elettra, Trieste, Italy); Image analysis to characterise in-situ wettability; pore-scale modeling of multiphase flow and  reactive transport in porous media;  Pore-scale direct simulation finite-volume based models (e.g. Bijeljic et al., Phys. Rev. E, 2013, Raeini et al.,Journal of Computational Physics, 2012; Akai et al., Transport in Porous Media, 2019; Oliveira et al., 2019) on micro-CT images, and pore network models (e.g. Bijeljic et al., Phys. Rev. E, 2011; Blunt et al., Adv. Water Resour., 2013; Raeini et al, Phys. Rev. E, 2018) are used to describe single and multiphase (gas/oil/water) flow in geologically representative  porous rocks at the macroscopic scale.

This work has been sponsored by Total, Qatar Petroleum, Shell and Qatar Science and Technology Park, Pore-scale Modelling Consortium, EPSRC, ETI and NERC. I am a member of and collaborating with the UK Carbon Capture and Storage Consortium, as well as QCCSRC and Shell Grand Challenge Programme on Clean Fossil Fuels and Energy Futures Lab at Imperial College.

B) Developing Modelling AND EXPERIMENTAL Tools for UNDERSTANDING Contaminant Transport AND REACTION in Subsurface Hydrology

The main goal is to predict the microscopic efficiency of contaminant remediation and carbon storage processes by estimating transport and reaction rates.

The subjects include non-Fickian and Fickian liquid and gas transport in porous media; development of a novel methodology based on probability density functions of transit times between pores to fully describe solute dispersion. The outcome of this approach has been to unifiy pore-scale network modelling with Continuous Time Random Walks (CTRW) theory and experiment (Bijeljic et al., Water Resour. Res., 2004; Bijeljic and Blunt, Water Resour. Res., 2006). Relying on this concept, a physically-based explanation for anomalous transport processes in natural porous media has been provided at multiple scales (Rhodes et al. Adv. Water Resour., 2008).

Furthermore, a novel modelling approach based on direct simulation of flow and transport on the voxelised micro-CT images of natural porous media has resulted in a novel methodology to explain the origin of non-Fickian transport by looking into and relating probability density functions of velocity and displacement (Bijeljic et al., Phys. Rev. Lett., 2011; Bijeljic et al. Phys. Rev. E, 2013; Bijeljic et al., Water Resour. Res., 2013) - these can be routinely used for fast characterisation of porous media heterogeneity.  This approach has been  expanded to study the impact of physical (flow) heterogeneity on effective reaction rates in fluid/fluid (Alhashmi et al., Transport in Porous Media, 2016; Oliveira et al., Adv. Water Resour., 2019) and fluid/solid (Pereira-Nunes et al., Water Resour. Res., 2016; Al-Khulaifi et al., Env. Sci. Technology, 2017).

C) Developing multi-scale imaging and modelling tools FOR FLOW AND REACTIVE TRANSPORT IN POROUS MEDIA

An important goal is to quantify key determinants of multiphase flow behaviour, i.e., the impact of wettability and microporosity on two-phase flow behaviour (Gao et al.,Adv. Water Resour., 2019), to help design storage and recovery schemes.  The key objective is to provide robust workflows that include experiments and modelling to help make key decisions in injection strategies.

Furthermore, scale-dependence of reaction rates in subsurface porous media has been systematically examined and quantified as a function of coupled physical and chemical heterogeneity in supercritical CO2/brine experiments (Al-Khulaifi et al., Water Resour. Res., 2019).

NMR studies have been proven to be an excellent tool for multi-scale characterization of dynamics of reactive transport in heterogeneous porous media (Muljadi et al.,J. Cont. Hydrology, 2018). These studies have been done In collaboration with the MRRC at University of Cambridge (the team lead by Prof. Lynn Gladden, Dr. Andy Sederman and Dr. Mick Mantle), demonstrating a combined imaging  and modelling approach to characterise dissolution processes.

• Chair of the Honours and Awards Committee and the Kimberly-Cark Distinguished Lectureship Award Committee of Interpore  since 2019.
• Serving on UKCCSRC Scientific Council, since 2017.
• Serving on the Diamond Light Source Working Group advising on future
  developments (2020-2025) of tomography Beamline I13, Since 2019.

• The President's Award for Excellence in Research, Outstanding Research
  Team, The Qatar Carbonates and Carbon Storage Centre, Imperial College (2018).
• Procter & Gamble Interpore Award for Porous Media Research (2016).
  American Geophysical Union (AGU) Award,
• Outstanding Reviewer for Water Resources Research (2016).
• Overseas Research Studentship (ORS) Award (1996-1999).