Program & Topics

The porous media flows appear as a fundamental environment in a wide range of technological applications and natural sciences. At the same time, they also bring very rich content to the areas of pure and applied mathematics, which study the fundamental basis for model construction and properties of their solutions, as well as the problems of numerical analysis and scientific computing. Because the multidisciplinary approach is intrinsic for the porous media studies, the development of mathematical theories has mutual benefit from the close connection to experimental works and innovative development, possibly of practical relevance for industry and/or society.

Following current trends of Interpore (2021 https://events.interpore.org/event/25 ) and (2023 https://events.interpore.org/event/41/), Energy & Climate porous media science and engineering has played an important historical role in the development of the current global energy system through the production of oil, natural gas, and coal. Unfortunately, combustion of the produced fuels has led to the current climate and carbon problem, prompting the urgent need to transition to a low carbon future. While renewables such as wind and solar will play a major role in the energy transition, creative uses of natural and engineered porous media will also be a critical part of any viable low carbon energy system. This includes improved methods for oil and gas production and new methods for subsurface energy storage including those that complement traditional wind and solar.  

A sustainable use of natural resources is crucial to preserve healthy terrestrial ecosystems, for example, maintaining food security. Many of the scientific and technical challenges related to these issues hinge on understanding, controlling and optimizing processes that involve the multiscale (in both space and time) dynamics of water and nutrients in the soil-plant system. Fundamental research on these interdisciplinary topics will provide guidance and novel solutions to improve human actions on agroecosystems and reduce their potential negative impacts.  

Changing the perspectives to renewable resources and more efficient processes, the transformation of biomass, such as sugarcane straw and bagasse, which are residues from the sugar and ethanol industry, into fuels and chemical products has the potential to become a viable alternative to fossil fuels, such as oil and natural gas. Making this transformation efficient and economically viable is one of the great challenges of this century. Catalysts are substances that facilitate chemical reactions used in practically all industrial processes that involve the transformation of primary products. The search for more efficient and more accessible catalysts has a direct impact on the economy and the environment, for example, by making production processes cheaper and providing cleaner industrial production.  

Petroleum industry as Oil Science covers several aspects that may include possible practical relevance and its mathematical complexity and engineering concerned with the activities related to the production of hydrocarbons. Around the world, there are hundreds of thousands of subsurface contaminated by human activities, with negative impacts on the environment and on human health. Understanding how the reactive flow occurs and time scales are fundamental information to improve these processes on an industrial scale and thus positively impact an entire population. Macroscopic multiphase flow phenomena can only be fully understood through a fundamental comprehension of the complex multiphase flow at the microscopic scale.  

Recently, the application of porous media science in the design of smart materials has gained significant interest within the scientific community. The main idea underlying such an attention resides in the possibility of manipulating pore size distributions for optimizing material response under particularly external stimuli, such as flow conditions, mechanical stress, chemical reaction and temperature gradients. Applications are widespread and involve the design of drug carriers, skin permeation, selection of material in buildings capable of reacting efficiently to weather conditions, mobile phone screens that repair themselves, among others.