Dear InterPore colleagues,

After rain comes sunshine, and after a long period of sunshine comes rain again. Unfortunately, rain won’t be easily absorbed by dry ground, as large parts of Europe are experiencing right now. A curious case of porous media? A sponge functions better when it is moist… One more: The risk assessment of the famous Dutch dikes involves also periods of droughts! Although normally associated with stopping tons of water, a Dutch dike actually collapsed back in 2003 due to a previous period of drought. Scientifically fascinating and societally relevant!

We’ve got a nice cross-section of InterPore activities in this Newsletter: welcoming a new staff member, educational opportunities (short course, KC lecturer, TeaTimeTalks), a report from the Brazilian Chapter meeting, the clickable banner to the InterPore2023 website, new publications and job offers.

All the best,

Matthijs de Winter
Editor-in-Chief
InterPore News

Kimberly-Clark Distinguished Lecturer 2023

The Kimberly-Clark Distinguished Lecturer 2023 is Professor Adrian Bejan from Duke University, USA. Adrian Bejan was awarded the 2018 Benjamin Franklin Medal for “his pioneering interdisciplinary contributions in thermodynamics … and constructal theory, which predicts natural design and its evolution in engineering, scientific, and social systems.” More on his impressive resumé can be found on our website.

His lecture, entitled Vascular materials: Predicting Design Evolution, will focus on one of his major contributions: evolutionary design illustrated in the case of multiscale vasculature, a methodology that can be used generally to predict the evolution toward flow access, miniaturization, high density of heat transfer, and the scaling up (or down) of an existing design. (full abstract)

How to host Adrian Bejan at your institute

Please visit our website for further information on how to apply.

New InterPore Customer Relation Officer

My name is Margaret Dieter, and I am happy to introduce myself as the newest member of the Executive Team.

I was born in Chicago in the midwestern United States. I graduated from Vanderbilt University in Nashville with a Bachelor’s in Political Science and French. I started my career in Washington, D.C. at a healthcare research firm, serving as a client product liaison for hospital executives around the US & Canada. I have since worked in client services and operations across various industries, including finance, media, and travel. I also recently completed my certification in User Experience Design, which focused on how to create products that delight rather than frustrate users.

When I am not working, I enjoy getting to know new people and places. I have had the pleasure of visiting 34 countries so far and have been living in Stuttgart with my family for the past four years.

I look forward to my work at InterPore. As I get up to speed on my new role as Customer Relation Officer, please do not hesitate to contact me with any questions. I can be reached at margaret.dieter@interpore.org.

Kind regards,
Margaret Dieter

5th Brazil Interpore Chapter Meeting report

The 5th Brazil InterPore Chapter Meeting took place in Brazil, 1-2 August 2021, free of charge. For more information about the 5th BR-InterPore as well as all presentations of the 20 distinguished speakers, please visit the website.

As a fully virtual conference 5th BR-InterPore had 366 participants from 19 countries around the world: 315 from Brazil and 51 from abroad (South America, USA, Europe and Asia regions), from academia and industry.

Across the country, new groups are emerging in cooperation to seek a better …read the full report (pdf, 73 kB)

Short Course by Rainer Helmig

The next short course to be hosted by the InterPore Academy for Porous Media will be taught by Prof. Rainer Helmig of the University of Stuttgart.

Lecture title: Porous Media Free Flow Coupling

Dates: November 14, 21, 28 and December 5 and 12 (from 3 – 6 pm CET).

Location: Online

Speaker: Prof. Dr.-Ing. Rainer Helmig

Please click here for more details and information.

Dear InterPore community,

After the summer break we are ready to start again with the “Porous Media Tea Time Talks”, the webinar series part of the InterPore Young Academy. You are warmly invited to the 38th Session, during which we are pleased to host Christopher A. Browne (Princeton University, USA) and Zaid Jangda (Heriot-Watt University, UK) on Tuesday, 23 August 2022 at 16:00 CEST. Join us via live YouTube stream.

The InterPore Academy for Porous Media is a new unit to promote educational activities, mainly to serve younger researchers, with a range of short courses, webinars, and workshops. See the website for further information.

Call for Award Nominations

InterPore recognizes young and senior scientists for their contributions in the field of porous media research as a sign of appreciation and as a stimulus for more excellent work. To ensure that the awards go to worthy awardees, we need you to nominate the candidates!

Please find more information about the InterPore Awards on this flyer.

Schur preconditioning of the Stokes equations in channel-dominated domain

Andreas Meier, Eberhard Bänsch, Florian Frank

We propose to use an unconventional precondition operator for the Schur complement of the stationary Stokes equations on porous domains. Discrete diffusion is added to the established precondition operator, which is heuristically motivated by Darcy’s law—a homogenization result of Stokes’ equations. The resulting operator is embedded into a block-diagonal precondition matrix for MINRES. For low-porosity domains or domains that contain thin channels, the number of iterations required to meet a certain tolerance is significantly reduced.

Computer Methods in Applied Mechanics and Engineering, Volume 398, 115264, 2022
Corresponding Author: Florian Frank

InterPore Members can promote their publications to the community via the InterPore In Journals Section of the Newsletter. If you wish to do so, please submit your publication 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 positions

• PhD position on Modeling unstable gas infiltration through initially saturated geomaterials, Ecole Centrale de Nantes (France) and Université de Liège (Belgium)

Postdoctoral position

• Post-doctoral fellow position on nature-inspired approach for non-invasive multiscale characterization of soft tissues, Montreal, Canada

Junior professor

• Junior Professorship (W1) in Advanced Methods in Porous Media, University of Stuttgart, Germany

If you have a job opening in your institute and would like to promote it internationally, please send the description and weblink or PDF to newsletter@interpore.org, and we’ll be happy to add it to the list.