Dear InterPore colleagues,

Working in science has the benefit of meeting many people from all different places. I believe it is a necessity for success because fruitful collaborations first start with a coming together. Going places proves inspiring because new places bring new contacts which bring new ideas. And, of course, being pulled out of daily routines for a while is a nice side-effect.

InterPore tries to facilitate these processes on a variety of levels. On a local scale, we have the InterPore Chapter meetings (read on for their reports and announcements). On a global scale, there are the annual meetings (InterPore2024 abstract submission has started!) and courses and webinars (see the Academy section) and Kimberly-Clark lectures.

So, looking for some inspiration, scroll down and take a pick!

All the best,

Matthijs de Winter
Editor-in-Chief
InterPore News

Introducing the Invited Student Paper Award

InterPore Journal is excited to announce a new award for students participating in the annual meetings: the Invited Student Paper Award. Recipients of this award will be selected from the students who present at the InterPore annual meeting. The awardee will be given the opportunity to submit an invited paper to InterPore Journal.

One can apply for this at the time of abstract submission via the provided field. The minisymposia conveners will nominate students for this award after all presentations have been given. In the end, up to 8 students will receive this award, which will be announced at the next Annual Conference.
For more information on this award, please see here.

Abstract submission for InterPore2024 is now open!
Submit your abstract to one of our 24 minisymposia prior to the 02 January deadline.

Getting to and around Qingdao

Arrival into Qingdao is easy with the newly built Qingdao Jiaodong International Airport, a regional hub and a gateway for Japan and South Korea. Qingdao Jiaodong International Airport is the first in China to offer both high-speed railway and subway connections, serving passengers via underground stations.

Two metro lines lead from the airport to the conference location at the Shangri-La Hotel. The fare costs around 1 Euro and travel time is about 90 minutes. Metro stations have signage in English, so getting around without speaking Chinese is easy.

For those that prefer, taxis between the airport and the Shangri-La are metered and generally cost around ¥120 (€16). Travel time from the airport to the hotel via taxi is generally about 75 minutes. More information about getting around Qingdao can be found on our website.

InterPore2025: Chair of IP Program Committee

Jaime Gómez-Hernández, a full professor of Hydrogeology at the Technical University of Valencia (Spain), was the President of the Local Organizing Committee for InterPore2019. He has accepted the appointment as Chair of the Program Committee for the upcoming meetings, starting with the one that will take place in Albuquerque, New Mexico in 2025. He is looking forward to continuing the successful trail of past meetings.

InterPore2026: Call for bids

InterPore2026 is planned to be held in a European country in the week starting 18 May 2026.

We would like to invite all potentially interested venues to send a short bid to Oleg Iliev, with a copy to Karolin Weber, by 15 December 2023.

To view the requirements for the short bid, please click here.

Kimberly-Clark Distinguished Lectureship

Prof. Adrian Bejan from Duke University, USA, continues to successfully present his award winning lecture, “Vascular materials: Predicting Design Evolution”, at various universities and institutions around the world.

On 22 September, he gave the opening lecture at the 12th Constructal Law Conference in Torino, Italy.

His next presentations will take place at the Journées d’Etude des Milieux Poreux (JEMP2023), France, on 17 October (in-person) and at the Indian Society for Heat and Mass Transfer, India, during the ISHMT Golden Jubilee Lecture Series (online), in December.

We are now receiving requests to host the 2024 InterPore Kimberly-Clark Lecturer, Prof. Ruben Juanes. Please visit our website for further information on how to apply.

Chapter News

France InterPore Chapter Meeting

The 16th edition of JEMP (Journées d’Etudes des Milieux Poreux) – the InterPore France Chapter conference on porous media – will be held at IFP Energie nouvelles, Rueil-Malmaison (near Paris) from 17 to 19 October 2023.

The discussions, mostly interdisciplinary, involve fundamental topics such as applied mathematics, fluid mechanics, heat and mass transfer, and process engineering. The scientific research carried out in these domains is relevant in several major areas related to environmental and societal needs: energy storage, pollution abatement, renewable energies, agri-food and health.

Click here for more details and to register.

WAIC Chapter Meeting

The West Africa InterPore Chapter will hold its annual meeting & symposium on 27-28 October 2023.

For the first edition of its annual meeting, WAIC invites researchers and industry professionals to register from now until 15 October. This symposium aims to foster interdisciplinary discussions and collaborations among researchers, engineers, and industry stakeholders to address the pressing challenges associated with mining activities in Africa, particularly the critical issue of mining waste management.

Visit the West Africa InterPore Chapter Meeting & Symposium page to learn more.

Report on the German InterPore Chapter Meeting

This year, the meeting of the German Chapter of InterPore was held at KU Eichstätt-Ingolstadt on 13-14 September 2023. The meeting was organized at the Mathematical Institute for Machine Learning and Data Science (MIDS) by the chair of Geomatics and Geomathematics, and included two invited talks and a total of 20 presentations on a wide range of research areas in the field of porous media.

Around 30 researchers, PhD students, and professors participated in the two-day meeting.

Read the full report here.

Free webinar with Inga Berre

Join us next Tuesday, 10 October at 4pm CEST for a free webinar with Inga Berre, University of Bergen, entitled “Modeling of flow and deformation in fractured formations.”

Fractures are mechanical breaks implying material discontinuity across surfaces or narrow zones in a formation. These have a strong impact on flow, deformation, and transport processes. The structural impact the fractures have on the processes, as well as the highly coupled nature of the dynamics, leads to challenges in the development of simulation models.

Motivated by processes caused by both injection and production and natural convection in geothermal systems, this webinar will provide an introduction to modeling of coupled subsurface processes in fractured formations. A focus will be on the interplay between shear and tensile fracture deformation, deformation of the porous medium surrounding the fractures and fluid flow and heat transfer. Numerical examples will illustrate the concepts for processes related to injection and production operations in geothermal reservoirs and related to natural hydrothermal convection in the roots of hydrothermal systems.

Click here for more information and to join the Zoom.

Add the invite to your Google or Outlook calendar.

InterPore Study Plan

Don’t miss the first installation of the InterPore Academy Study Plan in Porous Media “PORE 1-1 Fundamentals of porous media structure and characterization.”

Join lecturers Ryan Armstrong (UNSW Sydney, Australia), Martin J. Blunt (Imperial College, UK), Maša Prodanović (University of Texas Austin, USA), and Catherine Spurin (Stanford University, USA) as they explore imaging of porous media and image processing, quantification of pore-scale images, single phase transport, and multiphase flow.

Dates: The course will take place on Mondays from 13 November through 4 December 2023. The dates are as follows:

Monday, 13 November 2023 (13:00-16:00 AEST)
Monday, 20 November 2023 (13:00-16:00 PST)
Monday, 27 November 2023 (9:00-12:00 CST)
Monday, 4 December 2023 (17:00-20:00 GMT)

Please note, these renowned experts will be joining from across the globe. Therefore, lecture times vary weekly to accommodate time zone changes.

Recordings will be made available for participants that are unable to attend live.

Click here to register!

New Vice Chair for the Honors & Awards Committee

We’re glad to announce Dorthe Wildenschild as the new Vice Chair of InterPore’s Honors & Awards Committee.

I’m a professor of Environmental Engineering at Oregon State University (USA), and some might know that I also operate an x-ray microCT user facility at my university.

I’m excited to step into the role as co-chair for InterPore’s Honors and Awards Committee. I look forward to helping InterPore members be rewarded for their dedication, hard work and creativity – please contribute to this process by nominating deserving members of our community.

Groundwater Week 2023

Join the National Ground Water Association in celebrating 75 years of excellence during Groundwater Week 2023 December 5-7 in Las Vegas, Nevada (USA). This annual event provides a unique opportunity for professionals from all sectors of the groundwater industry to come together to exchange knowledge, share ideas, and learn about the latest advancements in science and technology.

The relation between dissipation and memory in two-fluid displacements in disordered media

Holtzman, R., Dentz, M., Planet, R., & Ortín, J.

Flow in porous media is controlled by the fluid’s energy and its dissipation. Despite the crucial importance of the knowledge of energy dissipation, evaluating it remains a daunting challenge. We present a novel framework: quasistatic displacements in a Hele-Shaw cell with gap thickness modulations. We use it to describe how the properties of the medium affect dissipation and show that even for very slow driving rates, the viscous energy (related to rapid fluid motion) is still noticeable.

Geophysical Research Letters, 50, e2023GL104073 (Open Access)
Corresponding Author: Ran Holtzman

InterPore Members can promote their publications to the community via the InterPore InJournals 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

• PhD position in porous media physics, Mehmani Research Group, Pennsylvania State University, USA)
• PhD position on the development of particle tracking algorithms for X-ray micro-CT, Ghent University, Belgium
• PhD position on multi-scale simulations of fluid flow and particle transport in porous media, Ghent University, Belgium
• PhD position on data-driven multi-scale models for coupled free-flow porous-medium systems. SimTech, University of Stuttgart, Stuttgart, Germany

Post-doc

• Post-doc on 3D X-ray velocimetry algorithms. Ghent University, Belgium
• Post-doc on Subsurface Flow and Transport. Energy & Natural Resources Security Group, Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), USA
• Postdoc / Research Software Engineer for C++ Porous-Media Simulator Development. SimTech, University of Stuttgart, Germany

(Assistant/associate) Prof

• Assistant Professor in Fluids and Complex Systems, Coventry University, UK
• Associate Professor in Fluids and Complex Systems, Coventry University, UK

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.
It is also possible to post the position on the InterPore website. Log in through MyInterPore and click “Submit a Job Opening.”