Physics Seminar: "Porous Media, Small and Large: From Quantum-Mechanical to Field Scale" by Professor Muhammad Sahimi

Thursday, May 1, 2014, 10 am to 11 am
Campus: 
Dayton
140 Health Sciences
Audience: 
Future Students
Current Students
Faculty
Staff
Alumni
The public

Wright State University
Physics Department Seminar
Thursday, May 1, 2014
10:00am in 140 Health Sciences

Porous Media, Small and Large: From Quantum-Mechanical to Field Scale
By: Muhammad Sahimi, Professor
Mork Family Department of Chemical Engineering & Materials Science
University of Southern California, Los Angeles

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Porous media and materials, both man-made and natural, are ubiquitous and around us. They exist over widely varying length scales, from the smallest ones with pores that are on the order of angstroms, such as biological tissues, nanoporous membranes and catalysts, to the largest, such as fractured oil, gas and geothermal reservoirs, landfills, and groundwater aquifers. Analysis and modeling of such greatly-varying multiscale systems has been fraught with complexities and difficulties. We describe new approaches to modeling of two classes of such porous media at two opposite limits of length scales. One is for the smallest length scale for which we develop a multiscale approach consisting of quantum-mechanical calculations, molecular dynamics simulations, and pore-network modeling. The second one is reconstruction of large-scale porous media for which we describe a novel method based on a new cross-correlation function.

Muhammad Sahimi is professor of chemical & materials science and the NIOC Chair in petroleum engineering at the University of Southern California. He received his B.Sc. degree from the University of Tehran, Iran, in 1977, and his Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis in 1984, both in chemical engineering. Since 1984 he has been a faculty at USC, where he was the Chair of his department from 1999-2005. He has also been visiting professor in Australia, Portugal, and Germany. He has published over 350 peer-reviewed papers and five books, as well as awards from the Humboldt Foundation, the APS, and other organizations. He is also the editor and publisher of the political website, Iran News & Middle East Reports, www.imenews.com

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