Conference Course #3: Importance and Quantification of Interfaces in Porous Media

Instructors: Dorthe Wildenschild¹ and Maša Prodanović²

¹ Oregon State University, USA

² The University of Texas at Austin, USA

Description

Three-dimensional (3D) imaging has allowed many porous media processes to be observed in detail, providing key insights into the mechanisms that directly impact their behaviors at larger scales. We will first review the importance of interfacial (fluid/fluid, fluid/solid) areas in porous media, the basics of their quantification from the high-resolution three-dimensional x-ray microtomography data and the challenging applications such as three-phase flow or biofilms. We will then demonstrate and upload an example research dataset to the Digital Porous Media Portal (https://www.digitalporousmedia.org/, formerly Digital Rocks Portal) and quantify and visualize interfaces captured in the data. This hands-on practice will include Jupyter Notebook (Python) workflows that can be run remotely within Digital Rocks Portal or on a personal laptop (they are open source applications Digital Porous Media Tools, https://github.com/digital-porous-media/dpm-tools).

We gratefully acknowledge the high performing computing systems that will be provided by the Texas Advanced Computing Center available through the Digital Rocks Portal. This workshop is sponsored in part by NSF GEO OSE grant #2324786. As part of the NSF grant, 10 early career researchers affiliated with the US institutions will be able to reimburse $500 of their travel expenses associated with the attending the course. Please use the following form to submit your application: https://forms.gle/aET11EgGtMCiAgPc7

Software Use and Requirements

The workshop will be a combination of presentations, literature overview and hands-on exercises. Presenters need to use and project their laptops, and a good internet connection. Attendees need to bring and use their laptops (and charge/plug them in – extension cords might be necessary) and internet access as well. Attendees will be expected to bring their laptops for hands-on exercises to either access Digital Rocks Portal or run the code independently (both options will be available). Visualization and image analysis software used in class include Python 3 programming environment (Anaconda distribution) for advanced exercises. All the open source code used in the workshop will be shared via GitHub. We do not assume working/programming knowledge for any of these software packages beyond basic familiarity with programming basics in Python (or similar language).

Getting Started Locally

The Jupyter notebooks used in the hands-on portion of this course depend on a number of open-source Python packages. While invite you to try out our dedicated JupyterHub VM on the new Digital Porous Media Portal (all required dependencies are pre-installed there), we understand if you'd rather work on your local machine.

To get started, please ensure you install the requirements with:

 pip install -r requirements.txt