Zhenxue Dai

• PhD in Civil Engineering, University of La Corunia
• Professor at Jilin University

This study develops a probability framework to evaluate subsurface risks associated with commercial-scale carbon sequestration in the Kevin Dome, Montana. Limited knowledge of the spatial distribution of physical attributes of the storage reservoir and the confining rocks in the area requires using regional data to estimate project risks during the...

Colloids have the potential to enhance mobility of strongly sorbing radionuclide contaminants in groundwater at underground nuclear test sites. This study presents an experimental and numerical investigation of colloid-facilitated plutonium transport in fractured porous media for identifying plutonium reactive transport processes. The transport par...

Physical heterogeneities are prevalent features of fracture systems and significantly impact transport processes in aquifers across different spatiotemporal scales. Upscaling solute transport parameter is an effective way of quantifying parameter variability in heterogeneous aquifers including fractured media. This paper develops conceptual models...

Deep learning models have been extensively applied to various aspects of hydrogeological modeling. However, traditional approaches often rely on separate task‐specific models, resulting in time‐consuming selection and tuning processes. This study develops an integrated Latent Diffusion Model (LDM) framework to address four key hydrogeological model...

With the growing emphasis on environmental protection, many coal mines in northern China were closed. However, the cessation of pumping operations in those closed mines has caused a rise in groundwater levels, giving rise to various safety and environmental concerns. Understanding the patterns of water level recovery is vital for effectively managi...

Machine learning has significantly improved inverse modeling for groundwater systems. One promising development is the tandem neural network architecture (TNNA), which integrates surrogate modeling and reverse mapping for efficient forward simulations and data assimilation. Although TNNA has shown success in groundwater inverse modeling, its applic...

The Groundwater Module within the Sustainability Nexus Analytics, Informatics, and Data (AID) Programme of the United Nations University (UNU) addresses critical challenges in sustainable groundwater management. Groundwater resources around the world are under increasing stress from overextraction and pollution, threatening water and food security...

Frost damage in seasonally frozen regions is a primary factor affecting tunnel safety, with frost heaving forces being the main external cause. Therefore, analyzing and calculating the distribution and magnitude of frost heaving forces on surrounding rock is essential for addressing frost damage in tunnels. When the frost heaving force exceeds the...

The accurate prediction of mine water inflow is very important for mine design and safe production. The existing forecasting methods based on single factors are often less accurate and stable. Multi-factor data-driven models play a key role in predicting water inflow without taking physical changes into account. Therefore, a multi-factor prediction...

Predictions of mining-induced water inrush accidents are challenged by data sparseness and imbalances, as very few high-quality datasets can be obtained for successfully modeling data variation. By using the concept of transfer learning, we employed a well recorded borehole group water level dataset as a source dataset to train a selection of Trans...

Biogeochemical reactive transport models (RTMs) are key for understanding the evolution of the quality of groundwater systems and their interaction with anthropogenic activities. The inherent stiffness of these models, within which bio‐geochemical reactions and transport processes take place simultaneously across diverse time scales, poses signific...

This paper provides a comprehensive exploration of the research progress in the field of rock statistical damage constitutive models. The introduction section highlights the significance and necessity of this research by discussing the background and importance of the rock statistical damage constitutive models. The damage mechanics section lays th...

The distribution coefficient (Kd) of radionuclides is a crucial parameter in assessing the safety of high-level radioactive waste (HLW) geological repository. It is determined in the laboratory through batch and column experiments. However, differences in obtained Kd values from distinct experiments have not been thoroughly assessed and compared. T...

The failure of rocks in seasonal frozen areas under freeze–thaw cycles (FTCs) is a frequently problem in engineering construction, posing a huge threat to the stability of the engineering. In order to explore the mechanism of rock damage degradation. It is necessary to analyze the damage evolution process of rocks and establish an accurate FTCs roc...

Subglacial lakes and hydrological systems play crucial roles in Antarctic subglacial hydrology, water balance, subglacial geomorphology, and ice dynamics. Satellite altimetry has revealed that some recurrent water exchange occurs in subglacial lakes. They are referred to as ’active lakes’, which prominently influence a majority of subglacial hydrol...

The orthogonal experiments of similar materials were optimized and analyzed in order to accurately simulate the mechanical properties and the fracture evolution law of thick coal seam overlying strata during mining in this study. The experimental results indicated that similar materials using gypsum and calcium carbonate as cementing agents had a w...

Promoting sustainable mining practices while safe-guarding water ecosystems demands precise anticipation of mine water influx. This investigation pioneers a novel approach harnessing microseismic monitoring to detect water-conducting conduits and elevate proactive response strategies. Through the utilization of microseismic energy density analysis,...

Drinking groundwater contamination by pathogenic viruses represents a serious risk to worldwide public health, particularly for enteric viruses, which exhibit high prevalence and occurrence during outbreaks. Understanding how enteric viruses adsorb in groundwater is essential to protecting human health and ensuring the sustainable use of water reso...

In underground mining process, the evolution of fissures, fractures, and breakages in overlying rock strata can lead to water inrush and many other serious risks including rock bursts, roof collapses, and ground subsidence. Since directly observing strata behavior is challenging, downscaled similar material simulations are often relied upon as a pr...

The disposal of high-level radioactive waste in deep geological repositories is a critical environmental issue. The presence of bentonite colloids generated in the engineering barrier can significantly impact the transport of radionuclides, but their effect on radionuclide sorption in granite remains poorly understood. This study aimed to investiga...

The utilization of carbon capture utilization and storage (CCUS) in unconventional formations is a promising way for improving hydrocarbon production and combating climate change. Shale wettability plays a crucial factor for successful CCUS projects. In this study, multiple machine learning (ML) techniques, including multilayer perceptron (MLP) and...

Due to population growth, the need for energy, especially fossil fuels, is increased every year. Since the costs of exploring new reservoirs and drilling new wells are very high, most reservoirs have passed their first and second periods of life, and it is necessary to use EOR methods. Water-based enhanced oil recovery (EOR) methods are one of the...

Climate change increase air, water and chlorophyll-a concentration in a few months. The Kvarken Archipelago is Finland's World Heritage site designated by UNESCO. How climate change has affected the Kvaken Archipelago remains unclear. This study was conducted to investigate this issue by analyzing air temperature and water quality in this area. Her...

The reliable identification of subsurface sedimentary structures (i.e., geologic heterogeneity) is critical in various earth and environmental sciences, petroleum reservoir engineering, and other porous media-related application. The application includes some important and societally relevant problems such as contaminated aquifer remediation, enhan...

Ongoing anthropogenic carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions to the atmosphere cause severe air pollution that leads to complex changes in the climate, which pose threats to human life and ecosystems more generally. Geological CO2 storage (GCS) offers a promising solution to overcome this critical environmental issue by removing some of the CO2 emissions....

Traditional mine water inflow prediction is characterized by a high degree of uncertainty in model parameters and complex mechanisms involved in the water inflow process. Data-driven models play a key role in predicting inflow mechanisms without considering physical changes. However, the existing models are limited by nonlinearity and non-stationar...

Shale reservoirs have gradually been recognized as promising potential candidates for CO2 geological storage due to their wide geographic distribution and enormous storage potential. CO2 sequestration in shale is a complex multi-scale process with spatial sizes ranging from nano-scale to kilometer-scale. In this study, an integrated multi-scale mod...

Lagrangian-based transport models provide effective ways of understanding mass transport processes within aquifer systems. The models provide a direct relationship between sparse data on sedimentary architecture (e.g., facies proportions and mean lengths) and physical and geochemical sediment properties (e.g., hydraulic conductivity (K) and sorptio...

Prediction of groundwater level is of immense importance and challenges coastal aquifer management with rapidly increasing climatic change. With the development of artificial intelligence, data-driven models have been widely adopted in hydrological process management. However, due to the limitation of network framework and construction, they are mo...

Micro-seismic monitoring during mining operations generates spatiotemporal data that could indicate strata fractures and deformations leading to water inrush anomalies. However, current water inrush prediction methods face challenges from the data non-stationarity and multi-dimensionality, resulting in low prediction precision and effectiveness. Th...

The radionuclide migration in the high-level radioactive waste (HLW) disposal is usually predicted by numerical simulations for risk analysis of radionuclide contamination in a large scale of time and space. However, the uncertainties in radionuclide migration models and their associated parameters significantly affect the simulation results. In th...

Reliable characterization of subsurface structures is essential for earth sciences and related applications. Data assimilation‐based identification frameworks can reasonably estimate subsurface structures using available lithological (e.g., borehole core, well log) and dynamic (e.g., hydraulic head, solute concentration) observations. However, a re...

Transition toward renewable energies is an important step to tackle climate change and to build a sustainable energy system. Fluctuation in availability of renewable energy sources is a major issue leading to demand and supply imbalance. To solve this mismatch, surplus energy can be converted to green hydrogen (H2) through water electrolysis and be...

Reactive transport processes in porous media with dissolution of solid structures are widely encountered in scientific and engineering problems. In the present work, the reactive transport processes in heterogeneous porous structures generated by Monte Carlo stochastic movement are simulated by using the lattice Boltzmann method. Six dissolution pa...

Water level variation of explorational boreholes in mining sites is one of the most direct representations of water inrush risk. Despite recent efforts on mine water inrush accident prediction based on various types of observation data including water level of boreholes using a wide range of machine learning models, the accuracy and timeliness of t...

The radionuclides sorption on fractured rocks is greatly influenced by the constituent minerals and their spatial variations of the fracture matrix. The mineral heterogeneity distributions can lead to potential scale-dependent sorption coefficients in fractured rocks. The indicator geostatistics-based upscaling (IU) method is one promising upscalin...

Groundwater monitoring networks are direct sources of information for revealing subsurface system dynamic processes. However, designing such networks is difficult due to uncertainties in the spatial heterogeneity of aquifer parameters such as permeability (k). This study combines deep learning and information theory with an optimization framework t...

This study develops an integrated framework to guide the monitoring network optimization and duration selection for solute transport in heterogeneous sand tank experiments. The method is designed based on entropy and data worth analysis. Numerical models are applied to approach prior observation datasets and to support optimization analysis. Severa...

The heterogeneity of sedimentary aquifers can be characterized by parameters related to the underlying sedimentary structure such as physical attributes of sediments (e.g., volume proportions and lengths of facies types). These parameters often reflect multiscale variability typically observed in the hydraulic conductivity field and the resulting f...

In many practical geochemical systems that are at the center of providing indispensable energy, resources and service to our society, (bio)geochemical reactions are coupled with other physical processes, such as multiphase flow, fracturing and deformation. Predictive understanding of these processes in hosting and evolving porous media is the key t...

Plutonium (Pu) in the subsurface environment can transport in different oxidation states as an aqueous solute or as colloidal particles. The transport behavior of Pu is affected by the relative abundances of these species and can be difficult to predict when they simultaneously exist. This study investigates concurrent transport of Pu intrinsic col...

Selenium (Se) sorption behaviors have been widely studied for evaluating radionuclide reactive transport in fractured granite. However, with disparate mineral compositions, the impact of fracture filling materials (FFMs) is often ignored in characterizing radionuclide sorption and migration. This study aims to investigate the contribution of FFMs t...

Underground coal mining suffers from groundwater intrusion from the aquifers overlying coal seams. Therefore, developing methods for the accurate prediction of roof water inflow is urgently needed to design a safe drainage system. In this study, we developed a novel upscaling framework to predict roof water inflow by integrating the multiscale hydr...

Carbon geological sequestration (CGS) in saline aquifers is an effective carbon utilization approach to decrease the effect of greenhouse gases on the atmosphere. However, the GCS project's fundamental problem remains accurate prediction of carbon trapping efficiency in storage formations. As a result, four machine learning (ML) models were explore...

Prediction of groundwater level is of immense importance and challenges for the coastal aquifer management with rapidly increasing climatic change. With the development of artificial intelligence, the data driven models have been widely adopted in predicting hydrological processes. However, due to the limitation of network framework and constructio...

Deep geological disposal is a widely accepted approach for safe management and long-term disposal of high-level radioactive waste (HLW). However, high uncertainty associated with subsurface properties of fractured rocks is a significant obstacle to practical safety assessment of HLW disposal. In this study, we develop an integrated statistical fram...

The purpose of this study was to quantify changes to underground sources of drinking water (USDW) quality in response to potential CO2 leakage from geologic CO2 sequestration (GCS) reservoirs. We developed a framework of combined laboratory experiments and reactive transport simulations and used this framework to evaluate the Ogallala aquifer overl...

Asymmetric loads often occur at tunnel entrances or exits during shallow buried tunnel construction. Due to asymmetrical loads, structures are subjected to complex forces, and the design process of these tunnels is different from that of regular tunnels. Therefore, it is necessary to discriminate asymmetric tunnels quantitatively. Currently, determ...

Generating reasonable heterogeneous aquifer structures is essential for understanding the physicochemical processes controlling groundwater flow and solute transport better. The inversion process of aquifer structure identification is usually time-consuming. This study develops an integrated inversion framework, which combines the geological single...

A large proportion (~80%) of the Indian subcontinent’s precipitation comes from the Indian summer monsoon (ISM), which influences one-fifth of the world’s population. A long-term reliable proxy for ISM is fundamental to understanding previous global climate change. We establish a mass-wasting-inferred proxy to examine the paleohydrogeology (river u...