Organization and Structure

International Society for Porous Media (InterPore) is registered with the Netherlands Chamber of Commerce under number 30252568.

The bylaws of the International Society for Porous Media can be downloaded here.

The Amendment (Amendment 1. Diversity, Equality and Inclusiveness) of the International Society for Porous Media can be downloaded here.

Porous media are encountered in many man-made as well as natural systems. Many industrial processes involve porous media flows. Some examples are processes in fuel cells, paper-pulp drying, food production and safety, filtration, concrete, ceramics, moisture absorbents, textiles, paint drying, polymer composites, and detergent tablets. The most well-known natural porous media involving multiphase flow and transport are soils, aquifers, and reservoirs. But such processes also occur in biological tissues and plants. Recently, there has been growing interest in the biomechanics of porous tissues, engineered tissues, and in-tissue drug delivery.

The common practice in modelling flow and transport in complex biological and industrial porous media has been to employ the concepts, models, and algorithms developed in the geosciences. However, biological and industrial porous media are significantly more complex than soils and reservoirs, and flow and transport processes occur in completely different regimes. Some major examples are as follows.

• Constitutive relations (e.g. capillary pressure curve) for soils and rocks are obtained under equilibrium conditions whereas many industrial flows are very fast and far from equilibrium.
• Porous media in the geosciences and biosciences are usually hydrophilic (exceptions are found in reservoir engineering and cellular membranes); in industrial processes, they can be completely or partially hydrophobic. Also, wettability changes are more common in many industrial porous media.
• Chemical reactions in the geosciences are usually slow and do not influence flow in the short term (although many exceptions are found in pollution and remediation processes and enhanced recovery techniques). This is often not the case in certain industrial processes (e.g. fuel cells, filtration, detergent tablets, food processing).
• Deformations in most biological and industrial porous media are fast and/or large and affect flows significantly. As a result, multiphysics and coupled phenomena are often more essential in such complex porous media.
• In complex porous media, we may encounter a variety of porous structures (granular, fibrous, foamy, layered, fractured etc.), length scales (nano-, micro-, and macroscales), different fluids (gaseous, liquid, gelatinous, supercritical), and a very wide range of porosity values (1 to 90%) that may change significantly in time and space. Furthermore, extremes such as very small pore sizes, high Reynolds numbers, and high temperatures may be encountered.

So there is a clear need to develop theories, models, and measurement techniques specifically applicable to complex porous media. Currently, there is no formal common platform for researchers in this extremely important area of porous media research. As a result, researchers in the various industrial systems mentioned above are often unaware of each other’s activities and sometimes the wheel is reinvented repeatedly. It is time to establish an international society to act as a platform for researchers active in modelling flow and transport in complex porous media.

Our aims

• to facilitate collaboration among industrial and academic researchers
• to bring together porous media theoreticians, modellers, and experimentalists from academia and industry
• to provide a forum for exchanging ideas and expertise for the improvement of porous media models
• to identify research questions that will lead to major improvements in the theories and models of complex porous media and to define modelling challenges
• to play a role in setting up strategic research priorities of major funding agencies on national and European levels
• to identify sources of funding for collaborative research among partners and facilitate the establishment of collaborative research projects
• to facilitate training and education

Scope of Activities

• Setting up and maintaining a website (with partially restricted access) where news, lists, and documents can be shared among members of the Society as well as the general porous media community
• Maintaining a Member‘s forum for questions and discussions on the website
• Organizing an annual conference on porous media as well as annual business meeting
• Setting up focus groups and organizing workshops focusing on specific research questions
• Preparing and distributing a newsletter on a regular basis
• Identifying and honoring members of porous media community who have made extraordinary contribution to the field
• Coordinating the preparation of documents (with the aid of a task force or committee) containing critical evaluations of current modelling practices of complex porous media as well as recommendations of modelling approaches appropriate for certain media
• Coordinating the preparation of short scientific documents outlining major gaps in our knowledge of complex porous media and sending these documents to national and European research centres and funding agencies
• Coordinating the study of major experimental methods for the characterization of material properties relevant to various complex porous media
• Facilitating contacts among scientists from industry and universities by maintaining a list of researchers and their expertise
• Maintaining a list of MSc- and PhD-level research subjects and facilitating contact among industrial researchers willing to host MSc and PhD students and the universities
• Organizing short-term exchange programs for staff members from industrial and academic partners