Dear InterPore colleagues,

The richness of the upcoming InterPore2022 conference is nicely reflected in today’s Newsletter: showtime for the musicians and other artists amongst us in the social program; short courses being offered during the conference; and, of course, your scientific input in the form of talks, posters (a great deal of abstracts have been received) and discussions with fellow scientists.

In other news, the task force Africa is moving forward. We’ve also got a call for abstracts, science, a lecturer on offer, jobs.. all reasons to go and check out this Newsletter!

All the best,

Matthijs de Winter
Editor-in-Chief
InterPore News

A great number of abstracts have been submitted. Thank you for all these contributions! We’re currently in the process of evaluating the abstracts and will notify the authors in due time about a place in the program.

InterPore2022 features two short courses, given by Prof. Martin Blunt Multiphase Flow in Permeable Media: A Pore-Scale Perspective and Prof. Majid Hassanizadeh Capillarity in Porous Media at Different Scales. For more information, please visit our website.

On behalf of the InterPore2022 organizers, the Student Affairs Committee (SAC) invites you to join us for a music presentation. If you play an instrument, sing, or perhaps have a band, you are warmly welcome to share your abilities with the InterPore community. This is a spontaneous way to expand our professional and personal networks. The call to all our talented musicians is now open. Please send us an email to sac@interpore.org. We will be waiting for you. Let’s have an incredible broadcast!

MDPI Energies Student Poster Award

The MDPI Energies Student Poster Award is given in recognition of outstanding student poster presentations at the annual InterPore conference. Each year, at the annual InterPore conference, the Student Awards and Grant Sub-Committee will choose the best student poster presentations to win the MDPI Energies Student Poster Award. Up to two awards will be given each year, each consisting of a prize of 500€. Candidates can self-nominate when submitting their abstracts to the conference.

More information can be found here.

This award has been made possible by a generous grant from MDPI Energies. Energies is a peer-reviewed, open access journal of related scientific research, technology development, engineering, and the studies in policy and management and is published semi-monthly online by MDPI. Please take advantage of the 10% discount on article processing charges to all InterPore members who publish in Energies.

Task Force Africa

The task force InterPore in Africa is moving forward. An online meeting towards the creation of a West African Chapter has been organized for 28 January (10:00 UTC+1:00). Please contact Ebigbo Anozie for further information if you intend to participate.

As part of our active expansion, we would like to extend our network of researchers. Please send us the contact information of any research associates in Africa you may have. Contributions to the database of contacts and any other suggestions you may have are greatly appreciated and should be provided as soon as possible.

Contributions, questions and comments can be sent to: Africa@InterPore.org.

Michel Quintard, InterPore President
Brahim Amaziane, Chair, Task Force for the Development of InterPore in Africa
Rachida Bouhlila, Co-Chair, Task Force for the Development of InterPore in Africa

Kimberly-Clark Distinguished Lecturer 2022

Professor Jacques Huyghe will be the Kimberly-Clark Distinguished Lecturer for 2022. As such, he will share a topic relevant to the industrial porous media community through a series of lectures at various member and non-member organizations.

The title of his lecture:
Poromechanics in extremely large deformation: swelling and fracture

An abstract of the talk and a short biography of Prof. Dr. Huyghe can be found on our website.

Apply now to request to host one of the 2022 InterPore Kimberly-Clark Distinguished Lecture series at your institute. Please visit our website for further information on how to apply.

Call for Abstracts: CFM2022

29 August – 2 September 2022

French Conference on Mechanics 2022 Session 28: Porous Media: transport, microstructural evolution, multi-physics coupling and instabilities

Conveners : Henri Bertin, Giulio Sciarra, Benoit Rousseau, Gérard Vignoles

This session aims to bring together academic and industrial researchers to present recent scientific advances in the study of the behavior of porous media, whether they are natural or manufactured materials. The session aims to focus on the development and identification of effective constitutive laws in porous media, under different stresses of physical, chemical, thermal and/or mechanical nature, studied separately or coupled. Research on transport phenomena (conductive/diffusive, convective/advective, ballistic/radiative) is a central topic of this session, as well as studies on the evolution of the microstructure of a porous medium (dissolution/precipitation, chemical reactions of deposition/ablation /erosion, mechanical deformations, localization, damage, etc.).

More information is given in the extended description (pdf, 138 kb) (in French).

Abstract deadline is 31 January 2022. Submit here

Pressure and saturation fluctuations observed during multiphase flow experiments: even at steady-state – are not necessarily noise but have a physical origin

M. Rücker, A. Georgiadis, R. T. Armstrong, H. Ott, N. Brussee, H. van der Linde, L. Simon, F. Enzmann, M. Kersten, S. Berg

In multiphase flow in porous media, steady-state conditions are intuitively associated with stable pressure and saturation. However, frequent reports in the literature show pressure and saturation fluctuations much larger than pore-scale displacement events. Our study has revealed the underlying physical origin of these fluctuations, which are neither random noise nor experimental artifacts but caused by a longitudinal flow instability causing travelling saturation waves which have a higher total mobility than flat saturation profiles. The observations are consistent with a hysteretic fractional flow model which may shed a new light on the conceptual picture of multiphase flow.

Frontiers in Water, 2021
Corresponding Authors: Steffen Berg

Tunable X-ray dark-field imaging for sub-resolution feature size quantification in porous media

B. Blykers, C. Organista Castelblanco, M.N. Boone, M. Kagias, F. Marone, M. Stampanoni, T. Bultreys, V. Cnudde, and J. Aelterman

Pore-scale imaging suffers from a trade-off between sample size and resolution, complicating imaging of materials with broad feature size distributions. Here, we propose a multiscale method using dark-field tomography. Alumina particles with different pore sizes (50 vs 150 nm) were imaged at TOMCAT (Swiss Light Source). The particles could not be distinguished from each other by regular micro-CT due to their similar density and their pores being unresolved. Nevertheless, our method allowed to quantify the sub-resolution pore sizes of individual particles. This demonstrates how dark-field image analysis can be used for multi-scale analyses of heterogeneous materials (e.g. example 1, example2).

Scientific Reports 11, 18446 (2021)
Corresponding Authors: Tom Bultreys

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, Development of a code for numerical simulation of THMC Thermal-HydrologicMechanical-Chemical processes in porous media, Université de Pau et des Pays de l’Adour, Pau, France
• Postdoctoral Scholar, Computational Solid and Fracture Mechanics, Pennsylvania State University, USA
• Research Associate, Chemical EOR including surfactant + polymer in carbonates under harsh conditions of temperature and salinity, Khalifa University, Abu Dhabi, UAE

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.