Porous Media, Small and Large: From Atomistic Modelling of Nano-porous Membranes to Modelling of Flow and Transport in Geological Formations

The Research Centre for Carbon Solutions (RCCS) at Heriot-Watt University is hosting this year’s Kimberly-Clark Distinguished Lectureship Award holder, Professor Muhammad Sahimi from the University of Southern California.

Flow, transport, reaction, adsorption and deformation (FTRAD) form an interesting set of phenomena that occur in a wide variety of porous media and materials over widely disparate length scales, from molecular, to pore, core, and field scales. Four different categories of fundamental challenges and their related modelling methods will be described in this presentation. First, a process-based modeling of fabrication of a nano-porous membrane based on quantum mechanical calculations and molecular dynamics simulations will be explained. A common modelling methodology of adsorption and swelling of several types of core-scale porous materials will be discussed next. Then, a description on the problem associated with reconstruction of porous media using limited data e.g., 2D and 3D images will be presented. Furthermore, a new technique based on curvelet transforms for speeding up simulation of the FTRAD in such images will be provided. Finally, the complexity of core to field upscaling will be discussed and a related multiresolution method to the problem based on wavelet transformations will be described.