Dear InterPore friends,

The end of 2022 is near, which means 2023 is about to start. Looking forward to 2023 brings up the InterPore election results which are published today. With a new president-elect, new council members and SAC members, the InterPore train keeps moving forward. Like in a relay race, we’re in this together, passing on the baton.

Many will take a few days off during Christmas and around New Year’s Eve. Enjoy some relaxing moments, or use the time to write to one of the tons of job opportunities we’ve listed below (or help someone writing). Or, perhaps you’ve already done so, but if not, you still can: Submit an abstract for InterPore2023.

Best wishes for 2023!

Matthijs de Winter
Editor-in-Chief
InterPore News

Reminder of Abstract submission deadline on Tuesday, January 3

To submit an abstract to one of the 23 minisymposia, please refer to InterPore2023 (22-25 May 2023): Call for Abstracts · InterPore Event Management (Indico).

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 The Three Bridges

Sweeping over the Firth of Forth, the three Forth bridges span three centuries and connect Scotland’s capital to the Fife region directly to its north. The Forth Rail Bridge was built in 1890 in the wake of the Tay Bridge disaster and was designed to project strength and stability to the travelling Victorians. A designated UNESCO World Heritage Site, it is one of the most recognizable structures in the world and is famous for taking so long to paint that once you have finished one end you have to start again. Although, its restoration gave it a new longer-lasting paint job – still in the same iconic red color. Built in 1964, the Forth Road Bridge was the longest outside the United States at the time, constructed to accommodate the rising number of private cars. The bracing between the tower in the shape of St Andrews Cross adds to its stylish appearance. A new road bridge was built in 2017 as part of a major road upgrade to accommodate modern traffic volumes. Known as the Queensferry Crossing, it is currently the longest three-tower, cable-stayed bridge in the world. The Forth Road Bridge is now open to cyclists, pedestrians and buses. The stunning panorama that the three bridges offer is well worth the short journey from Edinburgh to the quaint waterside village of South Queensferry (30 minutes by train).

Sponsor Update

We are pleased to announce that Math2Market has joined InterPore2023 as both a silver sponsor and exhibitor! We thank them for their support and look forward to visiting their booth in Edinburgh!

MDPI Energies Student Poster Award

Nominate yourself for the MDPI Energies Student Poster Award, which is given in recognition of outstanding student poster presentations at the annual InterPore conference. All registered students who have a poster presentation are eligible to be considered for this award. Up to two awards will be given, each consisting of a prize of 500€. To qualify, you must indicate during abstract submission that you wish to be included in the competition. More information can be found here.

This award has been made possible by a generous grant from MDPI Energies.

InterPore Election Results

Results of 2022 InterPore Elections are official!

The InterPore elections have concluded (as of 1 December 2022), and the Election Committee would like to thank all the candidates who stood for election and InterPore members who voted.

President-Elect

Congratulations to Vahid Niasar on being elected as President-Elect. Prof. Dr. Vahid Niasar is the professor and chair of Subsurface Engineering and Porous Media Physics at the Department of Chemical Engineering, University of Manchester, UK. He will be President-Elect for two years starting May 2023 and will become InterPore President two years later. At the same time, the current President-Elect, Karsten E. Thompson, will become President of InterPore.

Council Members

The four Council Members who have been elected for the 2023-2027 term (out of a total of eight candidates) are:

Peyman Mostaghimi and Monica Riva are currently members of the council and have been re-elected. Marie Elisabeth Rognes and Dominik Obrist will, as of May 2023, be new to the Council.

Student Affairs Committee

The four newly elected members of the Students Affairs Committee (SAC) are:

Starting 1 May 2023, they will work on the SAC together with Mohammad Nooraiepour, Manuela Bastidas Olivares and Nara Brandao Costa Santos. They will select a new chair of the Student Affairs Committee (currently Mohammad Nooraiepour), who will join the Council as the students’ representative.

Our sincere gratitude goes to the outgoing President, Michel Quintard (who will remain on the Executive Committee as Past President for a term of two years) and to the outgoing Council Members (elected in 2020), Veronika Schleper and Daniel Tartakovsky. Also, thanks to the outgoing SAC members Marco Sauermoser, Neerja Zambare, Javier E. Santos, and Cunqi Jia.

Our society has grown and improved due to your efforts and services to the community.

Best regards,

The InterPore Election Committee

Gabriel Wittum
Chair

Australian Chapter

Report on the International Conference on Porous Media & Third Biennial Meeting of Australian Chapter of InterPore

The third biennial conference of the Australian chapter of InterPore was held in Perth, Western Australia, from November 28 to 30. It attracted around fifty researchers from Australian universities, research organizations and industry. The conference consisted of several talks on a variety of topics from digital rock to groundwater and mineral recovery. There was a poster presentation session followed by a poster competition. A poster on the application of porous media methods for fuel cell analysis was announced as the winner of the competition. The organization of the conference was led by Stephanie Vialle (Curtin University/CSIRO), Tobias Mueller (CICESE), Victor Calo (Curtin University), Ben Clennell (CSIRO), Henning Prommer (CSIRO/UWA), Stefan Iglauer (ECU), and Peyman Mostaghimi (UNSW). The conference received grant funding from the Theo Murphy (Australia) Initiative administered by the Australian Academy of Science. At the end of the conference, it was decided to have the fourth national conference in Sydney in 2024.

Maša Prodanović is a Frank W. Jessen Professor in Hildebrand Department of Petroleum and Geosystems Engineering (PGE) at the University of Texas at Austin. She is an applied mathematician-turned-engineer and has expertise in direct simulation of flow and particulate transport in porous and fractured media, porous media characterization especially based on 2D and 3D images of rock microstructure, unconventional resources and data curation.

Permeability, diffusion coefficients or electrical resistivity of porous media containing multiple fluids phases are important in hydrology, enhanced oil recovery, energy storage or micro-vascular networks. Direct simulation combined with images (e.g. X-ray or scanning electron microscopy) provides a way to compute them in a specific porous media case regardless of its complexity.

Read the full abstract here.

Duration: 1 hour

Date/Time: January 10, 2023, at 9am CST (4pm CET)

Location: Online & in-person (The University of Texas at Austin).

Click on the banner for more info on online attendance.

InterPore Members, do you want to promote your publication to the community? If so, please submit your highlight to newsletter@InterPore.org. 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 (500 characters) 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

• 3 PhD positions in plant ecophysiology, functional anatomy, and gas transport in plants, Ulm University, Germany
• PhD position on modeling hydrogen transport in subsurface porous media. the Department of Petroleum Engineering, Texas Tech University, USA
• Evaluation of fault leakage rates in the context of subsurface hydrogen and carbon storage, Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, UK

Post-doctoral researchers

• EPSRC Postdoctoral Research Fellow – Nonequilibrium flow in disordered media: Memory, hysteresis, and energy dissipation, Coventry University, UK
• Postdoctoral Fellow on Leakage risk assessment of geologic CO2 storage, The Gulf Coast Carbon Center, University of Texas at Austin, USA
• Post-Doctoral position in Convective dissolution in porous rock, E2S UPPA in DMEX Centre for X-ray Imaging, University of Pau, France
• Postdoctoral Position: Direct numerical simulation and upscaling of dispersion and reaction fronts in two-phase displacements in heterogeneous porous media, Institute of Environmental Assessment and Water Research, Barcelona, Spain

Associates

• Research Associate in Pore-network Modelling of Multiphase Flow in Carbonates, Institute of GeoEnergy Engineering, Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, UK
• Research Associate in the field of geoinformatics and geo-computation, Institute of Geo-Hydroinformatics, Hamburg University of Technology, 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.