Dear InterPore colleagues,

We’ve composed another very diverse newsletter for you with updates on InterPore2023, reminders about the InterPore elections and the deadline for award nominations. We’ve got chapter meeting announcements and reports, as well as a lot of positions on offer, PhDs in particular.

With the ongoing GOP27 (the UNI Climate Change Conference) in Egypt in mind, I like this week’s paper highlight. Nima and co-authors point out that much more thought must be put in when designing something new to ensure it won’t become a burden for the climate. A simple but essential concept which should also be applied to our porous media research directions.

All the best,

Matthijs de Winter
Editor-in-Chief
InterPore News

Abstract submission now open!

Invited Speaker at InterPore2023

Professor Lidietta Giorno
Institute on Membrane Technology (CNR-ITM), Italy

Title: Porous biohybrid multifunctional membranes for biosensors and bioremediation

Lidietta Giorno is currently Research Director at the Institute on Membrane Technology of the National Research Council of Italy, CNR-ITM. She served as Director of the institute from 2009-2019. She is expert in membrane science and membrane bioengineering, with particular focus on biohybrid and bioinspired membranes, nanostructured and multifunctional membranes, enzyme immobilization, biocatalytic membranes, biocatalytic membrane reactors, membrane emulsification, membrane nanoprecipitation, integrated membrane processes for water treatment, membranes in downstream processing.

Minisymposia

MS02 Sustainable use of soil and water resources is crucial to preserve healthy terrestrial ecosystems and maintain food security. Many of the scientific and technical challenges related to these issues hinge on understanding, controlling and optimizing processes that involve the multi-scale (in both space and time) dynamics of water and nutrients in the soil-plant system, arguably the porous medium ‘par excellence’. With this theme in mind, this minisymposium aims to bring together… read more

MS18 The efficacy of methods used for the characterization, monitoring, and remediation of contaminated soils and aquifers is unavoidably associated with the multi-scale properties of unsaturated and saturated zones. The development of innovative and cost-effective methods for (i) mapping and monitoring polluted soils and surface emissions from spread pollutants, and … read more

Did you know….Edinburgh?

InterPore2023 will be in Edinburgh. Edinburgh has a lot of things to offer with respect to science, science history and porous media. This week: a Marathon Festival.

Fancy to stay a few days longer and run off the extra conference calories from catching up with your InterPore friends over breakfast, lunch and dinner? Edinburgh is home to the Edinburgh Marathon Festival. In 2023 it will take place 27/28 May right after our annual meeting and include distances from 5 to 42.2 km. After the London Marathon it is one of the most popular marathons in the UK with more than 40,000 participants across all distances taking part in 2022.

The InterPore Elections are underway. All current InterPore members are eligible to vote, so please do not forget to vote by 30 November! All members received an email from My Direct Vote (Email Subject: InterPore Election 2022 login information) on 1 November which includes a personalized link to our voting platform. Need support? Please contact Sandra Bartsch.

Kimberly-Clark Distinguished Lectureship tour 2022

The Kimberly-Clark Distinguished Lecturer 2023, Professor Adrian Bejan from Duke University, USA, has started his lectureship tour with great success. Just in October, he presented his lecture online at the University of Nottingham (UK), Kyushu University (Japan), the Kimberly-Clark Corporation (USA) and Dunarea de Jos University of Galati (Romania). In November, he presented his lecture at Duke University (USA).

It’s not too late to request Professor Bejan’s lecture at your organization. More information, including applications for hosting the Kimberly-Clark Lecturer, can be found on our website.

Research Spotlight: Kimberly-Clark

As one of InterPore’s long-term Platinum Sponsors, and backer of the Kimberly-Clark Distinguished Lectureship Award, Kimberly-Clark is a highly innovative company and well regarded in the industry. Porous media is an essential topic for most of their products, and they have highlighted some of their related research interests on our website.

Norwegian Chapter: 5th National Workshop on Porous Media

1 December 2022, Trondheim, Norway

The Norwegian Chapter of InterPore is organizing their 5th National Workshop on Porous Media. The scope is theoretical, computational and experimental poromechanics, porous media science and technology on topics related to recent technological advances in porous media research, microfluidics, thermo/fluid dynamics, poromechanics, and rheology–theory, modelling, and experiments.

Please download the flyer (PDF, 262 KB) or register directly for the workshop here.

Deadline: 15 November

BeNeLux Chapter meeting report

The fifth InterPore BeNeLux Chapter meeting was held at the Hasselt University on 14 October 2022. It was attended by more than fifty researchers, mainly from Belgium, Netherlands and Luxembourg, but also from Germany, Great Britain and Australia. The meeting started with a short opening given by the chair of the BeNeLux Chapter, followed by a scientific program organized in three blocks (one in the morning and two after lunch). In total, there were eight excellent presentations focusing mainly on energy/hydrogen storage and transport. The talks addressed a broad range of topics, including experiments, material design, visualization, but also mathematical modelling and simulation, and were given by participants from universities, research institutes, and the industry.

Head over to our website to learn more about the program and presentations from the day.

3rd Spanish Chapter meeting report

The third annual meeting and porous media workshop of the Spanish InterPore Chapter was held at the Retiro Building of the School of Civil Engineering of the Technical University of Madrid (UPM) on 26 October 2022. There was a total number of 54 participants from academia and industry, of which 36 participated in person and 18 remotely. The workshop had a diverse program with seven invited presentations on subsidence, random forests, the rheology of granular and active matter, modeling of bentonite and its expansion, methane hydrates and karst hydrology, as well as 11 posters on convective mixing, induced seismicity, chaotic porous media flow, diffusiophoresis, compound separation by membranes, machine learning, bacterial growth, phase changes, osmosis, microporous membranes and membrane distillation. More details and the program here.

The workshop was organized by Luis Cueto-Felgueroso, Francisco Javier Elorza and David Santillan (local committee) and Marco Dentz, Juan J. Hidalgo, Laura Gonzalez-Blanco, Elena Abarca, Maria Pool and Maria Barragan.

Call for award nominations ends 15 November

Senyou An, Research Associate at Imperial College London and recipient of the InterPore – PoreLab Award for Young Researchers 2022, visited PoreLab (NTNU+UiO) from 30 Sept – 10 Nov 2022 and summarized his visit for us:

First I would like to express my great thanks to InterPore and PoreLab for granting me this prestigious award. As a benefit of this award, I am currently on a one-month visit in PoreLab (NTNU+UiO). PoreLab is a multidisciplinary institution focusing on the porous media field with excellent researchers from different backgrounds. During my visit, the warm welcome and well-planned schedule made this award more meaningful to me. I appreciate the fruitful discussion and collaboration, which plays an essential role in my research career and will inspire me to go further.

Please visit our website and nominate a candidate!

BIP WEMP in Orléans

9-13 January 2023, Orléans, France

The University of Orléans in France is organizing the Blended Intensive Program (BIP) – short courses organized at the European level – on Digital Environmental Science. The program is intended for ~30 Master or PhD students. Students receive 3 ECTS for their attendance. The training is free of charge, and students can get stipend money from Erasmus+ funding for their stay in Orléans.

There will be introductory courses, seminars, and hands-on exercises on reactive transport modeling, computational fluid dynamics, geographical information systems, and digital rock physics. The students have to choose two of these specialties (either RTM + GIS or DRP + CFD) for the afternoon hands-on session. They will then work remotely on a group project, taking place after the training week in Orléans. The group project will be mentored online by the team of university professors in charge of the BIP at Orléans, as well as by colleagues from the partner universities of the Athena European program.

Additional details are available at the following links: BIP WEMP and University of Orléans.

Climate Informed Engineering: An Essential Pillar of Industry 4.0 Transformation

Nima Shokri, Bjorn Stevens, Kaveh Madani, Jürgen Grabe, Michael Schlüter, and Irina Smirnova

In this paper, we introduce the concept of Climate Informed Engineering as an emerging interdisciplinary field integrating climatic considerations in engineering products and services. The concept behind CIE is to enable engineers to build infrastructure, devices, sensors or develop new materials and processes that are informed by climate and climate change information. We believe CIE will be an increasingly important dimension of engineering science resonating with engineers and scientists with different backgrounds.

ACS Eng. Au (2022)
Corresponding Author: Nima Shokri

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 geo-processes in mineral carbon storage (GMCS), University of Minnesota, USA
• PhD position on catastrophic failure in rocks: how and when? University of Edinburgh, UK
• PhD position on phase transitions of carbon dioxide at equilibrium and non-equilibrium conditions, Delft University of Technology, Netherlands
• PhD position on investigating the role of structural and stratigraphic heterogeneities in regionally extensive mudstones in controlling vertical and lateral fluid migration in sedimentary basins, Newcastle University, UK

PhD positions Marie Skłodowska-Curie (EU)

• 11 PhD positions in the EU Horizon Europe Marie Skłodowska-Curie Doctoral Networks MSCA-DN Project SMILE (MultidiSciplinary and MultIscale approach for coupLed processes induced by geo-Energies, Grant Agreement No. 101073281). SMILE is a consortium of high-profile universities, research institutions and companies located in Spain, France, Norway, Italy, Czechia, UK, Switzerland, Netherlands and Germany. read more…

Postdoctoral Researchers

• Postdoctoral Researcher position on geo-processes in mineral carbon storage (GMCS), University of Minnesota, USA

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.