Joey joined the Bazant group in 2015, and has since been working on modeling of multiphase flow in porous media. These flows are ubiquitous in nature and applications: examples include water-air in soils, and water-oil-gas in petroleum reservoirs. There has been research on this topic for well over 100 years, the classical continuum model being Darcy’s law.

Joey is interested in understanding the hysteresis observed in capillary pressure and relative permeability, which are found in Darcy’s formulation. He uses probabilistic arguments to derive analytical formulae that relate the microscopic displacements of fluid phases, which are the origin of hysteresis, to macroscopic quantities. His eventual goal is to derive physics-based constitutive relations to expand continuum models of multiphase flow.