Johannes Salomonsen Løken joined PoreLab on February 24th, 2025, as PhD candidate at the Department of Chemistry. He earned his master’s degree in Industrial Chemistry and Biotechnology with a specialization in Advanced Theoretical Chemistry in 2024.
Johannes presents his PhD topic as follow:
My PhD project is part of the ERC-funded project Interlab: “Unravelling the fundamentals of transport across the vapor-liquid interface”, which aims to improve our understanding of transport phenomena across vapor-liquid interfaces. Our goal is to improve the current models of e.g. evaporation rates, and to better understand the heat-transfer mechanisms that occur at the microscopic scale.
Accurate models of vapor-liquid interfaces are essential when describing a wide range of systems. These include climate-models describing evaporation of lakes and oceans, modelling of micro/nanofluidic devices, and distillation modelling.
More about Interlab:
Transport of energy and particles across vapor-liquid interfaces is central for growth of rain drops in the atmosphere, evaporation from lakes, distillation columns, development of micro/nano-fluidic devices and much more. The objective of InterLab is to develop theory and methods to reproduce evaporation rates from steady-state experiments with water and octane within an accuracy of 10%. To reach its objectives, InterLab must fill major knowledge gaps in the fundamental understanding of transport across vapor-liquid interfaces. The tensorial behavior of the local thermal conductivity at the interface will be described and the nature of the thermal insulation layer at the vapor-side of the vapor-liquid interface will be understood. Octane and water will be investigated to clarify the role of hydrocarbon chain contributions and hydrogen bonds. The predictions from the new theory will be tested against nonequilibrium molecular dynamics simulations and new evaporation experiments.
Johannes’s main supervisor is Professor Øivind Wilhelmsen.