IMPORTANT NOTICE: Please, send registration info (your name and e-mail address to Marina Karsanina: marina.karsanina@gmail.com), this is necessary to estimate the number of participants and redistribute training materials and software prior to the course!
Also note that you will need a laptop (preferably fully charged) for practical work.

Motivation: In numerous scientific areas dealing with flow and transport in porous media such as hydrology, soil and rock physics, petroleum engineering, X-ray microtomography (XCT) is the key tool to obtain information on rock/soil structure under study. If structural information is obtained, one can utilize so-called pore-scale modelling to simulate fluid flow directly in the pore space of the 3D porous media images. Even the simplest workflow to simulate single phase flow and compute permeability requires a number of steps, image processing including segmentation and solution of the Stokes equation in 3D geometry being the most critical or time consuming. Recent developments in the field of pore-scale modelling allow to perform decent simulations using a modern personal computer, but such tools are still not widespread in routine research work.

Aim: To provide an introduction and basic tools to perform all necessary steps from X-ray microtomography images to single-phase flow simulations.

Plan: 1) Introduction to 3D imaging, image processing and pore-scale modelling (20 min.); 2) Overview of available software/solutions and typical problems (10 min.); 3) Description of solutions developed by our group and available to the public (10 min.); 4) Hands-on image processing and segmentation (30 min.); 5) Hands-on single phase flow modelling (20 min.); 6) Interpretation and visualization of results (20 min.); 7) Interactive session with questions (5 min.).
For all hands-on sessions you will use free software developed by our research group (FaT iMP) and some other freely available packages. All necessary materials, including sample XCT images, will be distributed by organizers prior to the course.

What will you learn: 1) The basics of porous media imaging, 2) how to prepare and crop XCT images for pore-scale modelling, 3) how to segment images using current state-of-the-art local thresholding techniques, 4) how to simulate single phase flow and compute permeability of porous media samples from 3D images.
At the end of the course you will be able to simulate single-phase flow based on grey-scale XCT images of porous media.