Title:
Effect of scale on flow and transport properties in porous media Abstract:
Flow and transport in porous media are typically investigated at four main scales, i.e., pore, core, lysimeter, and field. A long-standing problem in the porous media community, therefore, has been relating a property’s value at one scale (e.g., field) to its value at another scale (e.g., core). This process is called scaling and has been an active subject of research in the past several decades. The influence of scale has been known for years. It is well documented that flow and transport in soils, rocks and fracture networks are scale-dependent due to the presence of spatial heterogeneities. However, our knowledge of scale and its effect on fluid flow and solute transport in porous media is still limited. In this talk, I focus on finite size effect and present applications of finite-size scaling analysis from statistical physics to analyze the scale dependence of flow and transport properties. Bio:
Behzad Ghanbarian is an Associate Professor at the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of Texas at Arlington. He is the author of 120 peer-reviewed journal articles and three books. His research interests center around a wide range of multidisciplinary topics, such as climate change, unconventional reservoirs, upscaling techniques, and fluid flow and contaminant transport in heterogeneous porous media. He is a member of AGU, SSSA, and SPE and received the 2015 Donald L. Turcotte Award in nonlinear geophysics from the American Geophysical Union as well as the 2020 Soil Physics and Hydrology Division Early Career Award from the Soil Science Society of America. Behzad was also listed among the top 2% of scientists in the world in 2021, 2022 and 2023. He also received the TWISS Graduate Teaching and Mentoring Award from Kansas State University in 2021 and 2022. |
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