News and Announcements#

  • 2022-12-24 - Congratulations to Niloo for successfully defending her PhD!

    Niloofar Misaghian joined the PMEAL group in the fall of 2018, and after 4 years of intense learning and research she successfully defended her thesis on December 9th. It was a slam-dunk, with 3 first-author papers, plus authorship on another. Not to mention many contributions to the OpenPNM and PoreSpy code bases. Thanks for all your hard work Niloo!

  • 2022-10-10 - What’s New in OpenPNM V3

    It’s been a long process, much longer than we would’ve liked, but OpenPNM Version 3.0 is finally here. Version 2.0 was released in August 2018, and version 2.8.2, the last of the V2 series, was released in September 2021. This 3 year stretch saw a lot growth in the OpenPNM userbase, which if we use the Github star count as a proxy, showed a 300% increase over the period!

  • 2022-06-03 - PMEAL Members Represent Strong at CRSC 2022

    The 4th annual Canadian Research Software Conference was held earlier this week. Several members of the PMEAL group were present, and for the 4th straight year we won a top poster award! Congratulations to Niloo for her hard work and enthralling the audience with her work on the use of AI to predict diffusive conductance for use in extracted pore networks. This poster was based on her recently published paper Computers and Geosciences. Also, a nod to Amin who presented a 20 minute short talk on the use of Julia to speed up numerical computations. This talk led to many follow-up conversations during the coffee breaks, and was really very convincing. Maybe OpenPNM V4 will be in Julia?

  • 2022-02-09 - Adding Gravity to Image Based Drainage Simulations

    The PMEAL team recently developed a way to add gravitational effects to the standard drainage simulation algorithm based on sphere insertion, also sometimes called morphological image opening or full morphology. The paper is available in Water Resources Research. This post will give a brief overview of how to use this new algorithm, which is being included in a new function called drainage located in the also newly added porespy.simulations module. The new drainage function can produce results with or without gravity effects, creating a more powerful yet flexible function for performing such simulations.

  • 2021-12-14 - Prof Gostick presents new image-based invasion algorithm at AGU21

    The annual fall meeting of the Americal Geophysical Union (aka AGU) is underway this week. The PMEAL group gave a talk about our new image-based invasion algorithm that incorporates gravity. This work was motivated by the ever increasing size of tomograms, which introduces the possibility that gravity may impact the phase distributions. Standard sphere insertion algorithms only include capillary effects, so this work extended them to also include gravity. This work is currently under review, so a more detailed announcement and demonstration will be made when it’s accepted, but for now you can watch a pre-recorded video of the talk here.

  • 2021-12-07 - Prof Gostick Named Inaugural Azzam-Dullien Endowed Professor

    The Department of Chemical Engineering recently received a generous donation from a former PhD student, Dr. Mohamed Azzam. Dr. Azzam undertook his PhD studies under Prof. Francis Dullien in the early 1970’s. His work focused on hydraulic flow through complex conduits (see [1], [2], [3], [4], [5]), and contributed to the development of the pore network modeling approach pioneered by Prof. Dullien and his team later that decade. After graduation Dr. Azzam founded a successful company and had recently decided to honor Prof. Dullien and his former department with a generous gift. The Azzam-Dullien Endowed Professorship was created, and Prof. Jeff Gostick was named as the inaugural recipient for a term of 4 years. This endowment is earmarked to fund graduate students in the area of transport in porous media, which will ensure the continued legacy of porous media research at the University of Waterloo.

  • 2021-07-04 - PMEAL Blog and Website now hosted on Github Pages

    We used to host all our websites, openpnm.org, porespy.org and pmeal.com, on an Amazon cloud server using Wordpress. A few months we updated the PoreSpy website/landing page to be the same as the documentation site and moved it to Github instead of “Read The Docs”. Having all the code and docs in the same place was very handy, so we did the same thing to the OpenPNM website. Now that we are only hosting one website on the Wordpress instance, it makes sense to move PMEAL over to Github as well. The new site is not quite as fancy looking due limitations of the static build of Github Pages, but seems to looking pretty good so far. Over the next few weeks we’ll be improving things.

  • 2021-06-05 - Overview of Image-Based Invasion Percolation

    The PMEAL team, in collaboration with researchers from Queen Mary University in London, have written a new algorithm for simulating fluid invasion into tomograms. This image-based approach is complementary to the widely used “morphological image openning” or “full morphology” approaches. The existing approaches are equivalent to increasing the applied pressure and tracking the invaded volume, while our new approach is equivalent to increasing the invaded volume and monitoring the pressure.