Environmental Internship Program - 2023 Booklet

CLIMATE AND
ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE
PROJECT TITLE
Carbon Dioxide and
Hydrogen Storage in
Water-saturated
Bentonite Clay Systems
ORGANIZATION(S)
Interfacial Water Group,
Department of Civil
and Environmental
Engineering, Princeton
University
LOCATION(S)
Princeton, New Jersey
MENTOR(S)
Ian Bourg,
Associate Professor of
Civil and Environmental
Engineering and the High
Meadows Environmental
Institute; Xiaojin Zheng,
Postdoctoral Research
Associate, Civil and
Environmental Engineering
Kaustuv Mukherjee ’26
OPERATIONS RESEARCH AND FINANCIAL
ENGINEERING
Certificates: Architecture and Engineering,
Finance
I developed molecular dynamics simulations
to visualize how bentonite clay would perform
as a barrier for supercritical CO 2
injected below
the Earth’s surface. Studying clay mineralogy
and sequestration methods helped enhance my
understanding of these simulations. I worked
with the Large-scale Atomic/Molecular Massively
Parallel Simulator software to run simulations,
utilizing Princeton’s Stellar computing cluster to
run the larger scripts and the Visual Molecular
Dynamics program to visualize the output files.
Most of my time was spent using the MATLAB
programming language to add CO 2
to a bentonite/
montmorillonite clay system at different water
saturation levels, simulating CO 2
sequestration
in the porous subsurface. I used the elementary
physical model of CO 2
due to its agreement with
experimental data in our relevant temperature
range. The clay-water-CO 2
models that I
developed can help predict seal integrity over
time for large-scale sequestration projects.
I enjoyed working with the Interfacial Water
Group and found how physics concepts play
into developing accurate molecular dynamics
simulations especially interesting.
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