Christopher MacMinn

Chris’s background is in mechanical engineering, with a specialization in fluid mechanics, elasticity, and applied mathematics. He earned his PhD from the Department of Mechanical Engineering at MIT, supervised by Ruben Juanes. The focus of his research was on the fluid mechanics of geological carbon dioxide (CO2) sequestration, where CO2 is captured from the flue gas of power plants and injected underground for long-term storage. Chris used modeling and experiments to study the subsurface migration and trapping of the buoyant CO2 after injection.

At Yale, Chris is working jointly with John Wettlaufer and Eric Dufresne on flow-driven deformation of porous materials. He is studying the impact of this fluid-solid coupling on the development of hydrodynamic instabilities and on the mechanics of wave propagation, with application to fluid injection into the subsurface.