“Did you ever wonder how we can store solar heat in a thermal battery, so that we use it to heat our houses in winter? Or how much oil can we still get out of the ground? Or maybe, you want to know how we can stop pollution infiltrating into groundwater?”
These are some of the questions used to trigger Utrecht and Eindhoven bachelor students to dive into the topic of Porous Media.
Utrecht University and Eindhoven University of Technology have developed a bachelor elective program on Porous Media, building on existing bonds and complementary content. Lecturers from the Departments of Geosciences, Mechanical Engineering and Applied Physics have designed an introductory course on Porous Media. In addition to that students take a course from the bachelor program of the other university. More specific, UU students will learn about the physics of transport phenomena in a TU/e course. TU/e students will study the different aspect of water in geological process in the relevant UU course.
These electives will provide students with an overview of the fundamentals and applications of porous media flow, such as groundwater remediation, oil and gas production, blood flow in medical tissues and geothermal energy, based on the fundamentals of mass, momentum and energy transfer. Both analytical and numerical techniques will be used and an overview of experimental approaches will be given.