Dear InterPore friends,

Happy New Year! I hope that 2021 will bring you good health, good spirit and a great environment for living
and working. When those pieces fall in place, beautiful science will follow, almost as a natural consequence.
That is why we look after each other.

Those looking after InterPore are our president, council and Student Affairs Committee (amongst many other
InterPore committees, of course). But to start the year with great news: The election results led to an
indisputable outcome. See below!

And we have more: Australian Chapter News, a Research Spotlight, paper highlights and new positions becoming
available. How is that for a nice start of 2021.

All the best,

Matthijs de Winter
Editor-in-Chief
InterPore News

InterPore Elections Results

The InterPore elections have concluded (as of 01 December 2020), and the Election Committee would like to
thank all the candidates who stood for election and the InterPore members who voted. The election results are:

President-Elect

Congratulations to
Karsten Thompson

on winning the
election for
President-Elect.

Karsten E. Thompson is Professor and Department Chair of Craft & Hawkins Department of Petroleum
Engineering at Louisiana State University. He will be President-Elect for two years starting from 01 May 2021
and will become InterPore President two years later. In the meantime, the current President-Elect, Prof.
Michel Quintard, will become President.

Council Members

Maša Prodanović, Associate Professor and Chevron Centennial Teaching Fellow in Petroleum
Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin, and Maja Rücker, Assistant Professor at the
Mechanical Engineering Department at the Eindhoven University of Technology have been elected for the
2021-2025 term and will serve as council members as of 01 May 2021.

Veerle Cnudde, Vahid Niasar, and Benoît Noetinger have
been re-elected to the Council. Congratulations to the newly elected as well as the re-elected members of the
council! They will work together with the four council members that were elected until 2023 (Veronika
Schleper, Daniel Tartakovsky, Monica Riva, and Peyman Mostaghimi) and with a student representative (currently
Marcel Moura).

The five Council Members who have been elected for the 2021-2025 term (out of a
total of nine candidates)
are:

Student Affairs Committee

Congratulations to the three newly elected members of the Student Affairs Committee (SAC):

Starting 01 May 2021, they will work on the SAC together with Neerja Zambare, Marco Sauermoser, Mohammad
Nooraiepour, and Cunqi Jia.

Australian Chapter meeting

The InterPore chapter in Australia has rescheduled their biennial meeting. The meeting is scheduled
between 2-5 May, 2021. More information can be found on this
flyer (191 KB) and through the InterPore
website.

Abstract deadline: 31 January

Research Spotlight

The Center for Subsurface Energy and the Environment (CSEE) at
the University of Texas at Austin has published their InterPore
Research Spotlight (531 KB) on our website.
Find out about their mission statement and research programs, which covers chemically enhanced oil recovery,
digital reservoir characterization technology, digital rock petrophysics, fracture research and application,
multi-scale rock physics for unconventional and carbonate reservoirs and carbon capture and storage.

Research Spotlights offer an excellent opportunity to increase the visibility of your institute. Please
contact the InterPore office for more information.

InterPore Kimberly-Clark
Distinguished Lecturer 2021 also online

Given the current situation with regards to the COVID-19 pandemic, Prof. Dr. Sahimi will also be able
to bring the lecture to your institute online, including Q&A and unfolding discussions. Please visit the
website
or contact the InterPore office for more information.

The Kimberly-Clark Distinguished Lecturer Series in 2021 features

Prof. Dr. Muhammad Sahimi
University of
Southern
California, USA

The title of the lecture is: Porous Media, Small and Large: From Atomistic Modeling of Nano-porous
Membranes to Modeling of Flow and Transport in Geological Formations.

An abstract of the talk and a short biography of Prof. Dr. Sahimi can be found on our website.
Apply now to request and host the 2021 InterPore Kimberly-Clark Distinguished Lecture at your institute!

InterPore Online Short Course Registration

Did you know that the explanation of molecular origin of “surface tension” that is found in the literature
and on almost all websites (including those from major universities) are not quite correct?

Did you know that the force balance diagram for a contact line that is shown in the literature is incomplete
and one force is missing!?

Due to capillarity, water goes up in a column of a porous medium against gravity and friction forces. Where
does the required energy come from?

Did you know that macroscopic (or average) capillary pressure is almost never measured in experimental
studies, certainly not under flow conditions? The measurement of standard capillary pressure-saturation curves
(e.g., for primary drainage, main imbibition, and main drainage) for a soil or rock sample commonly takes a
couple of weeks. Then, those curves are used to simulate processes that may occur in the span of a couple of
hours. Is that acceptable?

Click here to register for
the short course by Professor Majid Hassanizadeh, who will address these and more fascinating questions.

SHORT COURSE #3: Capillarity
in Porous Media at Different Scales

Instructors: Majid Hassanizadeh, Utrecht University, The Netherlands
Date: 11-14 January 2021

Registration fee:

Click here
for more information and registration.

Predicting Long-term
Dynamics of Soil Salinity and Sodicity on a Global Scale

Amirhossein Hassani, Adisa Azapagic, Nima Shokri

Soil salinity varies across space and time due to natural events such as droughts or human
activities like fertilization and irrigation. We used machine learning algorithms with climatic, topographic,
soil, and remote sensing data as input to develop a long-term analysis of 40 years of topsoil salinity and
sodicity changes across the globe. Our analysis showed that a soil of 11.73 Mkm2 was salt-affected between
1980 and 2018, nearly 20% greater than the area of the USA. The results can help to determine the likelihood
of salt-affected soils in a particular area and support decision making under current and future climate
scenarios for sustainable land, water and ecosystem management.

PNAS 2020 117 (52) 33017-33027
Corresponding
Author: Nima Shokri

Fully
Implicit Dynamic Pore-Network Modeling of Two-Phase Flow and Phase Change in Porous Media

Sidian Chen, Chaozhong Qin, Bo Guo

We develop a novel fully implicit dynamic pore-network model for two-phase flow in porous media.
The algorithm is numerically stable and mass conservative for all flow regimes including near quasi-static
(Ca→0) and unfavorable displacements. The dynamic simulations precisely recover the quasi-static solutions at
equilibrium states. Additionally, the framework has been extended to include compressible two-phase flow,
multicomponent transport, and phase change dynamics. Example simulations of two-phase displacements accounting
for phase change show that evaporation and condensation can suppress fingering patterns generated during
invasion. More generally, the current framework allows for coupling other physical and chemical processes for
broader applications.

Water Resources Research 2020,
56(11)
Corresponding Author: Bo Guo

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.

• PostDoctoral
  position in multiphase flow and hydrodynamic transport in permeable media: experiments, data analysis, and
  simulations. University of Barcelona, Spain
• Associate Professorship of Engineering
  Science (Civil Engineering – Fluid Mechanics), University of Oxford, United Kingdom

If you have a job opening in your institute and you want international promotion for it, please send the
description to newsletter@interpore.org and we’ll it to the list