This award provides 53% funding for the acquisition of an internally-heated pressure vessel capable of maintaining pressures up to 0.1 GPa (10 Kbars) and temperatures up to 1400K simultaneously. The pressure system is to be installed and operated in the Fluids Research Laboratory in the Department of Geological Sciences at Virginia Institute of Technology and State University. The equipment will be used primarily in research on the properties of geologically relevant fluids under the ambient conditions in the Earth's crust. Present work in the Fluids Research Laboratory is focussed on water and carbon dioxide fluid mixtures with dissolved chloride salts, their behavior when trapped in fluid inclusions in minerals, and their use in the reconstruction of geological conditions at the time of fluid inclusion formation.
