Marie Curie Workshop on Flow and Transport in Industrial Porous Media
Utrecht University, 12 - 16 November 2007
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Marie Curie Workshop on Flow and Transport in Industrial Porous Media
Utrecht University, 12 - 16 November 2007 |
| Marie Curie Workshop on Flow and Transport in Industrial Porous Media / Scope |
Various industrial processes involve porous media flows. Examples are processes in fuel cells, paper making, food quality and safety, filtration, concrete, ceramics, moisture absorbents, to name a few. The common practice in modelling flow and transport in such porous media is to employ the concepts, model, and algorithms developed in geosciences. However, many industrial porous media are significantly different from soil and, correspondingly, flow and transport processes occur in different regimes. Some major examples are: Constitutive relations (e.g., capillary pressure curve) are obtained under equilibrium conditions whereas many industrial flows are very fast. Porous media in geosciences are usually hydrophilic; in industrial processes they can be completely or partially hydrophobic. Chemical reactions usually do not influence flow in geosciences. Often not so in certain industrial processes (e.g. fuel cells, filtration, food industry); Deformations of soils/rocks are negligible or slow, not always so in industrial flows; Multiphysics/coupled phenomena are more essential in the industrial flows. Industrial porous media often have a very wide range of porosity values (1 to 90%). There is a clear need for developing theories, models, and measurement techniques specifically applicable to industrial porous media. This Workshop deals with upscaling of (coupled) subsurface flow and transport processes. For a proper description and modelling of complex processes in multi-scale heterogeneous subsurface, an appropriate method for transfer of information between various spatial scales is crucial. In this Workshop, fundamentals of various upscaling techniques applicable to coupled subsurface flow and transport modelling will be presented and a number of applications will be discussed.
The aim of this workshop is to bring together porous media modelers and experimentalists from both geosciences and industry, to provide a forum for exchanging ideas and expertise for the improvement of porous media models, and to identify challenges in the modeling of industrial porous media.