Assessing cell viability with dynamic optical coherence microscopy.

Assessing cell viability is important in many fields of research. Current optical methods to assess cell viability typically involve fluorescent dyes, which are often less reliable and have poor permeability in primary tissues. Dynamic optical coherence microscopy (dOCM) is an emerging tool that provides label-free contrast reflecting changes in cellular metabolism. In this work, we compare the live contrast obtained from dOCM to viability dyes, and for the first time to our knowledge, demonstrate that dOCM can distinguish live cells from dead cells in murine syngeneic tumors. We further demonstrate a strong correlation between dOCM live contrast and optical redox ratio by metabolic imaging in primary mouse liver tissue. The dOCM technique opens a new avenue to apply label-free imaging to assess the effects of immuno-oncology agents, targeted therapies, chemotherapy, and cell therapies using live tumor tissues.

Interface pinning of immiscible gravity-exchange flows in porous media.

We study the gravity-exchange flow of two immiscible fluids in a porous medium and show that, in contrast with the miscible case, a portion of the initial interface remains pinned at all times. We elucidate, by means of micromodel experiments, the pore-level mechanism responsible for capillary pinning at the macroscale. We propose a sharp-interface gravity-current model that incorporates capillarity and quantitatively explains the experimental observations, including the x~t(1/2) spreading behavior at intermediate times and the fact that capillarity stops a finite-release current. Our theory and experiments suggest that capillary pinning is potentially an important, yet unexplored, trapping mechanism during CO(2) sequestration in deep saline aquifers.

Capillary fracturing in granular media.

We study the displacement of immiscible fluids in deformable, noncohesive granular media. Experimentally, we inject air into a thin bed of water-saturated glass beads and observe the invasion morphology. The control parameters are the injection rate, the bead size, and the confining stress. We identify three invasion regimes: capillary fingering, viscous fingering, and "capillary fracturing," where capillary forces overcome frictional resistance and induce the opening of conduits. We derive two dimensionless numbers that govern the transition among the different regimes: a modified capillary number and a fracturing number. The experiments and analysis predict the emergence of fracturing in fine-grained media under low confining stress, a phenomenon that likely plays a fundamental role in many natural processes such as primary oil migration, methane venting from lake sediments, and the formation of desiccation cracks.

Lifetime of carbon capture and storage as a climate-change mitigation technology.

In carbon capture and storage (CCS), CO(2) is captured at power plants and then injected underground into reservoirs like deep saline aquifers for long-term storage. While CCS may be critical for the continued use of fossil fuels in a carbon-constrained world, the deployment of CCS has been hindered by uncertainty in geologic storage capacities and sustainable injection rates, which has contributed to the absence of concerted government policy. Here, we clarify the potential of CCS to mitigate emissions in the United States by developing a storage-capacity supply curve that, unlike current large-scale capacity estimates, is derived from the fluid mechanics of CO(2) injection and trapping and incorporates injection-rate constraints. We show that storage supply is a dynamic quantity that grows with the duration of CCS, and we interpret the lifetime of CCS as the time for which the storage supply curve exceeds the storage demand curve from CO(2) production. We show that in the United States, if CO(2) production from power generation continues to rise at recent rates, then CCS can store enough CO(2) to stabilize emissions at current levels for at least 100 y. This result suggests that the large-scale implementation of CCS is a geologically viable climate-change mitigation option in the United States over the next century.