Research Interests
I arrived in September 2005 at Princeton University and started in January 2006 to work with Professor Scherer. As with all new students, I have a lot of papers to read and to understand before I can really start. My goal was to produce a numerical model to better understand the effect of salt crystallization on stone. This would have to include wetting and drying behavior of the stone, salt ion transport, salt crystallization, stress due to this crystals, and its effects on the stone (deformation and rupture).
Preliminary development of the model showed that it could provide valuable insight into the behavior of ice growing in pores, so I decided to focus on that problem. The model revealed that dendrites form as ice grows through a porous network. This was the subject of my Masters thesis, TRANSPORT IN POROUS MATRICES: AN APPLICATION OF THE PHASE FIELD METHOD, submitted in January, 2007. We will be submitting the results for publication soon.