Our Group

Yaniv did BSc in physics and oceanography in the Hebrew University, MSc and Ph.D. in the Weizmann Institute, and postdoc in the soft matter physics lab at Harvard University. Currently, Yaniv is heading the porous media visualization (PMV) lab in the Technion, where  investigates may aspects of flow, reaction, and deformation in porous media. To study that in the PMV lab we replace the porous soil and rock with an equivalent transparent porous material developed in the lab. The transparent porous material allows direct quantification of the following processes occurring in soil and rock: transport in porous media, reaction rates of chemicals during transport, displacement of resident phase in the porous media by a miscible or immiscible phase, and deformation of the porous material during the transport. Advanced microscopy methods do the quantification and in-house using light-sheet microscopy coupled with an ultra-high-speed camera with 105 frames per second. This unique experimental setup gives access to the hidden dynamics of real soil physical processes.

Pressurized fluid injection into underground rocks occurs in applications like carbon sequestration, enhanced geothermal energy production, wastewater disposal and hydraulic fracturing, and may lead to human-induced earthquakes and surface uplift. The fluid injection raises the pore pressure within the porous rocks, while deforming them, yet this coupling is not usually limited to postmortem inspection and cannot capture the complete deformation process in time and space. 

We investigate injection-induced deformation of a unique rock-like medium mimicking the deformation of sandstone, yet under low pressure. We create this unique medium by sintering plastic particles at the size of sand grains. We incorporate and solidify about 1% fluorescent particles within the sample to track the local deformation. The tracking is achieved by saturating the sample with oil (immersion liquid) that has similar optical properties as the plastic particles, transforming the artificial rock from opaque to transparent, apart from the fluorescent particles that fluoresce. We then inject the same oil at higher and higher pressure through the artificial rock while measuring the injection pressure and capturing the fluorescent particles movement by using a high-resolution fast camera. Because the fluorescent microspheres are part of the material structure their movement represent the internal deformation of the medium.