Biography

Dr. Sergi Molins is a research scientist in the Earth and Environmental Sciences at Berkeley Lab with extensive experience in the field of reactive transport modeling in porous media. His research focuses on elucidating processes affecting the formation of effective reaction rates at different spatial scales in subsurface applications relevant to energy and the environment. He currently investigates pore scale mechanisms controlling mineral dissolution rates in carbon sequestration scenarios (Molins et al., 2012, 2014b) and the role of microbial dynamics in natural and laboratory systems (Molins et al., 2014a; Druhan et al., 2012; Beller et al., 2014).  He has also investigated the feedback mechanisms between biogeochemical reactions and gas transport in the vadose zone by means of the Dusty Gas Model (Molins and Mayer, 2007; Molins et al., 2008, 2010). Code development is an integral part of his work, having contributed to the reactive transport codes MIN3P (U. Mayer, UBC) and CrunchFlow (C. Steefel, LBNL). He has recently focused on the development of programming interfaces between existing geochemical codes and HPC simulators of flow and transport (Beisman et al., 2015, Alquimia), including Chombo-Crunch, a high-resolution reactive transport code for the direct numerical simulation of pore scale processes (Molins et al., 2012; Trebotich et al., 2014).