Dr. Chiara GAVIOLI was granted an FWF ESPRIT Project for her proposal on Homogenization in Porous Media with Preisach Hysteresis (FWF grant ESP-387) mentored by Prof. Elisa DAVOLI.

The mathematical modeling of flow in porous media is of paramount importance in science and engineering. In many practically relevant examples the pore space is filled with a two-phase liquid-gas mixture, with different pressures in each phase. In this case, the medium is said to be unsaturated. Experimental evidence indicates that fluid filtration through unsaturated porous media exhibits a hysteretic behavior. This phenomenon arises at a microscopic level, and can be explained by the surface tension on the contact between water and air in the pores. As a result, the pressure-saturation constitutive relation turns out to be of hysteresis type, and can be accurately described resorting to the Preisach hysteresis operator. Chiara GAVIOLI’s project aims to provide a justification of the Preisach operator as the correct tool to describe filtration by considering porous media as objects with a microstructure and developing a multiscale homogenization analysis.

The Institute of Analysis and Scientific Computing congratulates Chiara on receiving this grant!