Dear InterPore friends,

The end of the year is nearing. What a year it was. Certainly not as we would have imagined one year
ago. Of course, science progressed, and we get better and better at online activities, but the human
tragedies caused by COVID-19 does cast a major shadow over everything. Unfortunately, the near
future will likely look similar.

As a community, we can look after each other in bad times like this in general, and for example for
those near to Andro Mikelic in particular. Fortunately, we can also share good times, as with award
winners, and when moving into the new year. We’ve got the InterPore Academy of Porous Media
starting, InterPore2021 to look forward to and hopefully some renewed energy for great science.

Take care!

Matthijs de Winter
Editor-in-Chief
InterPore News

InterPore Academy of Porous Media

InterPore is establishing a new unit to promote educational activities, mainly to serve younger
researchers, called the InterPore Academy of Porous Media, and will be organizing short courses,
webinars, and workshops. It will also set up a YouTube channel for Short Educational Videos (3 – 10
min) with videos of experiments showing advanced results (also 3 to 10 min) and recorded lectures,
aimed at undergraduate/graduate students.

The Academy President will be appointed by the InterPore Executive Committee for a period of three
years. We’re grateful that Professor
Oleg Iliev has agreed to be appointed by the Executive Committee as the
founding president of the Academy.

Short course Martin Blunt

Martin Blunt’s Short Course wrapped up this week. The four day course was well attended by people
from all over the world. Participants from both academia and industry attended. For those who were
unable to attend the live session, the recordings were available each day for viewing at their
convenience. The course provided an overview of pore-scale imaging, analysis and modeling with an an
emphasis on how the fundamentals inform practical applications.

Upcoming activities at the Academy

The series of Short Courses is
continued by Hadi Hajibeygi (11 – 15 December). He will discuss Scalable
Simulation of Nonlinear Processes in Heterogeneous Fractured Porous Media.
Registration is still open.

Majid Hassanizadeh will kick off in the new year with the short course entitled Capillarity
in Porous Media at Different Scales (12-15 January 2021).

The InterPore Academy of Porous Media website is currently under construction and will soon feature
all ins and outs of the Academy.

It deeply saddens us to report to you that on 28 November,

a well-known scientist in our community, passed away. Andro Mikelic was a
professor at the University
of Lyon in the Department of Mathematics. He was an internationally recognized specialist of
homogenization theory and received the InterPore Procter & Gamble Award in 2012.

Please read
here the full In Memoriam written by Grégoire Allaire, Brahim Amaziane and Sorin Pop on
behalf of the French and Benelux InterPore Chapters.

(Inter)national awards for InterPore
members

EGU John Dalton Medal

Life-long active InterPore member Brian
Berkowitz will be awarded with the John Dalton Medal during the next EGU
meeting. The medal is awarded for distinguished research in hydrology reviewed as an Earth
science. Congratulations!

The InterPore community is growing and amongst the InterPore community, we have many very famous
scientists… and scientists on their way to fame through (inter)national recognition. Sometimes
we hear about medals and awards given to our community members, but sometimes we don’t. It is
good news, so we would like to share it. Please bring these awardees to our attention via newsletter@interpore.org.

Call for abstracts: vEGU 2021

19–30 April 2021, Online

Session: ERE4.2 Hydrogen for energy storage in the subsurface, from laboratory research to
future low-carbon energy scenarios

Conveners: Niklas Heinemann, Katriona Edlmann, Suzanne Hangx, Christopher Yeates (ECS)

The use of hydrogen as a fossil fuel substitute opens a range of opportunities to decarbonise future
energy systems in line with the international climate protection agreements. Large-scale underground
storage sites such as salt caverns as well as porous media, e.g., saline aquifers and depleted
hydrocarbon fields, could store large volumes of hydrogen safely and hence hydrogen storage can
contribute significantly to reduce the emissions from fossil fuel-based energy sources in several
energy sectors such as transport, heating power generation and energy storage. To highlight the
importance of understanding the principles of hydrogen storage on different scales, this session
aims to bring together scientists from all disciplines interested in the implementation of a
hydrogen-based, low-carbon future. Click here for more
information.

Abstract deadline is 13 January 2021 at 13:00 CET

Porous Media Visualization Challenge

InterPore member Masa Prodanovic (The University of Texas at Austin) and James McClure (Virginia
Tech) shared an announcement.

Reuse 3D data from the Digital Rocks Portal to
create graphic, video, or 3D printed visualizations and compete for sponsored cash prizes up to
$1,000 for US-based participants. All details are here
including videos and
Python Notebooks from their
visualization mini-course for porous materials data. Entry deadline has been extended to 17
January 2021.

We are grateful for the sponsors who made the event possible: South Big Data Innovation Hub (main sponsor), Object Research Systems (“Enchanted Rock” premium
sponsor), Kitware (“Town Mountain Granite” sponsor), and Dassault Systèmes (“Austin Chalk” sponsor).

The Complexity of Porous Media Flow Characterized in a Microfluidic Model based on Confocal Laser
Scanning Microscopy and micro-PIV

Matthijs de Winter, Kilian Weishaupt, Stefan Scheller, Steffen Frey, Amir Raoof, Majid
Hassanizadeh, Rainer Helmig

Steady-state single-phase fluid flow through a regular pore pattern surely is not
complicated! Well, based on confocal microscopy, micro-PIV and computer simulations, we draw a
different conclusion. We postulate that predicting hydrodynamic dispersion requires streamline
routing combined with Brownian diffusion. Streamline routing has not yet been solved for complex
pore geometries (can only be extracted from experimental/simulation data), while Brownian diffusion
(low to moderate Peclet numbers) requires considering the history of individual streamlines. While
simple Poiseuille flow quickly develops in pores, the time-of-arrival of solutes varies randomly
across those same pores, as shown in our experimental and simulation data.

Transport in Porous Media
(2020), doi: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11242-020-01515-9
Corresponding Author: Matthijs de Winter

InterPore Members, do you want to promote your publication to the community? If so, please submit
your highlight to newsletter@InterPore.org.
Clearly indicate which of the authors is an InterPore member (or the institute with an
Institutional Membership). Note that we will not review the entries nor does
InterPore endorse the published work. Furthermore, we publish on a “submitted first, published
first” basis. The highlighted publication should be no older than 6 months (available
online).

The highlight should be short (max 100 words) and contain an illustration.
Please note that we offer this opportunity exclusively to InterPore members. If you would like
to become a member, please have a look here.

• PhD position, Multiphase flows in engineered
  porous media, Coventry University and University of Warwick (co-tutelle), UK

If you have a job opening at your institute or company, and you’d like to promote it
internationally, send the description to newsletter@interpore.org along with any PDFs or
links to its online listing, and we’ll be happy to post it here.