Our latest workshop was attended by delegates from the UK, France, Slovenia and Spain. It was again well received (see feedback) and enjoyed by all who attended. The photo on the right was taken after the course dinner in downtown Madrid. See also the formal group photo, some of the teaching sessions (1 and 2) in the seminar room of Bonsai Advanced Technologies, and the lunch after the course ended.

The University of Plymouth received several major CETL (Centre of Excellence in Teaching and Learning) awards from the Higher Education Funding Council in 2006, and one of these was used to update and digitize its planetarium. It is now an Immersive Vision Theatre that really does immerse the viewer in what he or she is watching. The first home-grown film to be produced featured Pore-Cor Research Suite, and molecular dynamics used in the third year chemistry course. It has been used at many open days, most recently, in June 2008, for mathematics students from local schools.

Peter Matthews and Deborah Holtham attended the 8th Characterisation of Porous Solids conference, in Edinburgh. They presented a poster, organized by Juergen Adolphs of Porotec, demonstrating the use of Pore-Cor in the elucidation of the structure of ordinary Portland cement and ultra high performance concrete.

We were pleased to welcome Dr Safia Semra for a one-month sabbatical. She is a lecturer in chemical engineering in the the department of industrial chemistry of the University Mentouri of Constantine, Algeria. While in Plymouth she used Pore-Ped and Pore-Cor to model the diffusion of pollutants into soil aggregates. She is pictured with Daniel Gantenbein, a member of the research group normally based at Omya in Oftringen near Zurich, on a visit to the Tudor manor house of Cotehele, near Plymouth.

Peter Matthews and Debbie Holtham have visited Jean-Marc Sabattié at France Scientifique, Loos. France Scientifique is a relatively new agency for Therrmo Fisher, covering all of France. They discussed new initiatives for marketing Pore-Cor Research Suite, and planned a meeting in September for Thermo Fisher pore characterisation customers in France - contact Jean-Marc Sabattié for details.

Julian Villamor proudly showed off the new premises of Bonsai Advanced Technology in Madrid. He and Peter Matthews discussed the new advances in Pore-Cor, including a network dongle which allows large suites of computers to be controlled by a single dongle, and demonstrated the new flexible throat size distribution, and the new flow tracking, filtration and diffusion algorithms (see Laudone et al.) . Discussions also revolved around the programme for the next training course. This will definitely take place during 18-20th June 2008 (unless of course nobody at all decides to attend!) - the only doubt is whether it will be in Madrid or Plymouth. So please contact us if you would like to attend, and if you would prefer one or other venue.

Peter Matthews has returned from a sabbatical at the Department of Applied Mathematics in the Research School of Physical Science and Engineering in Australia's premier university - the Australian National University in Canberra. He used his time there, at the invitation of Prof Mark Knackstedt (centre), to create an autocorrelation algorithm for Pore-Cor in collaboration with Christoph Arns (left). The algorithm calculates the void-void auto-correlation function at quasi-infinite resolution, and is more appropriate for future, dual porous, versions of Pore-Cor than the traditional Fast Fourier Transform method. He also visited the Leslie Research Centre, Toowoomba, and linked up with the soil physics group in Sydney University.

See also the Applied Mathematics Building, Jack Christopher of the Leslie Research Institute demonstrating the properties of black cracking clay on their experimental farm, and a leech waiting to attack during a bush walk through sub-tropical jungle near the coast east of Canberra.

Pore-Cor version 6, which has many new features, generated much interest and positive comment at its launch. Pictured is Peter Matthews testing the software on the German IBM ThinkPad of Tobias Eckardt of Engelhard Process Chemicals GMBH . Tobias had also attended a Pore-Cor RS training course recently, and was worried that Pore-Cor seemed to behave differently on IBM ThinkPads - but we proved that problem had been sorted out. The software was also successfully tested on a range of samples on an Italian computer. So after further testing at sites in six different countries, we are on track for the full release - see Testing, Price and Availability .

See also Dr Deborah Holtham talking to an attendee (Prof Wahab), and the presentation by a 81-year old (Prof Sing) of the best poster prize to a 82-year old (Prof Robens) !

Debbie Holtham, whom many of you may know through her additional role as customer support manager for Pore-Cor, gained her doctorate on July 28th, subject to minor changes in her thesis. The external examiner commended her for her outstanding thesis on Soil Structuring beneath White Clover. Her investigation covered a very wide range of structural and elution studies, and also included modelling the effects using Pore-Ped and Pore-Cor. She is shown on the right being congratulated - see also the examiners (Sacha Mooney and John Maskall), some of the celebrators, and Debbie reading her congratulations card.

Meanwhile Peter Matthews as Principal Investigator, and a very strong team of other UK soil scientists, has won a major research grant from the UK's Biology and Biotechnology Research Council's Agri-Food committee, for a study entitled 'Understanding soil quality and resilience: effects of perturbations and natural variations on nitrous oxide emission, water retention and structure'.  The total allocation is around £1.138m (BBSRC contribution £911k), of which the totals for Plymouth are £301k and £241k respectively.  The programme includes three other UK institutions: the Institute of Grassland and Environmental Research (IGER), North Wyke , Devon; Rothamsted Research, near London; and the Scottish Informatics, Mathematics, Biology and Statistics group (SIMBIOS), University of Abertay, Dundee. Pore-Cor underpins the whole programme, and brings its total research funding to over £2m, including grants from two other UK research councils - EPSRC (Built Environment) , and NERC (Environmental Diagnostics). 

Our latest training course and workshop was once again very well received by those who attended (see their appraisal). It was hosted by InterScience, at Louvain-la-Neuve near Brussels in Belgium, and featured an introduction by Luca Lucarelli of Thermo Electron. He talked about the new ISO standard for mercury porosimetry (ISO 15901-1:2005 ). Highly accurate experiments are essential for obtaining a new, much wider range of information from Pore-Cor RS, including information about the bulk modulus of the solid phase by use of Pore-Comp.

We have not yet decided when and where the next course will be, although we have already received enquires about it. If you are interested in attending, please see the further information. Then contact us, and we will try to accommodate your needs.

See also picture 1 and picture 2 of one of the teaching sessions.

Peter Matthews presented some of the latest work on paper coatings at the TAPPI Advanced Coatings Fundamentals Symposium, in Turku, Finland, in what several attendees said was the most engaging lecture of the conference. It detailed work, currently in press, about the tracking of the formation of coatings structures by looking at the sizes of effective particles or 'skeletal elements' of ground calcium carbonate, shown purple in the unit cell on the right.
(To view the structure in virtual reality, save the GC90 zip file to your computer and extract all the files to the same directory. Then double-click on GLView.exe and File | Read the file VR_structure_Tappi_2006.wrl . To get started, just click and drag your mouse on the picture. Click on Help at the top right of the GLView screen to get more help on how to use the viewer. )
 
Cathy Ridgway of Omya AG also presented a paper at the conference in which Pore-Cor RS had been used, and the software was mentioned several times in discussion.
The next presentation on this theme, in which we will describe how we can model the entire aggregation process and the forces acting as a coating dries, will be presented in Stockholm in June.

A problem with exporting mercury porosimetry files from Thermo Electron Pascal mercury porosimeters has been the great number of variations possible in the headers, only some of which Pore-Cor can recognise. To get over this problem, Thermo Electron's output software now features an 'Export to Pore-Cor' option, as shown on the screenshot. Luca Lucarelli and his colleagues and agents in Thermo Electron also made a range of other suggestions to us about the software when we made a flying visit to Powtech in Nuremberg, all of which we are working on.

John Price presented a paper at the Filtech conference, reporting one progress on using Pore-Cor flow-through mapping (June 2005 below) as a means of modelling dynamic filtration processes. The approach, is, as usual with Pore-Cor, a combination of sophisticated maths and approximations which make the approach applicable to real filters - in this case sintered stainless steel filters manufactured by Porvair filtration. The presentation was greeted with enthusiasm, and resulted in an invitation to present a paper at the Filtration Society meeting in Loughborough, UK, where an update of the work was presented by John.

The 3rd International Short Course was again greeted with enthusiasm by attendees, this time from Italy, France, Germany and the UK. The workshop featured a workshop session on modelling multiple properties of sandstone (porosity , percolation, thin-sections, absolute permeability and NMR), based on work submitted for publication. The next course is scheduled for April 2006.

See also pictures of a champagne break, sepia view of teaching session, dinner 1 and dinner 2.

In September 2005, sales of Pore-Cor Research Suite had generated a sufficient income to pay off the loan from the University of Plymouth for the commercial part of the software development. Now the account is in credit, we have much more flexibility in forward planning for marketing and customer support. So a great day, marked by very well deserved champagne!

Shown in the photograph are from back row left, Peter Matthews (project leader), Christophe Canonville (University of Rennes, who has been calibrating the software and modelling NMR data), Maurizio Laudone (post-doctoral fellow and technical support), and in the front row John Price (PhD student working on a new dynamic filtration algorithm, and customer support), Deborah Holtham (soil research fellow, distribution and customer support manager), Susan Boulton (business manager) and Suzanne Ash (accounts manager).

On 10th June Peter Matthews held a one-day Pore-Cor course at Johnson Matthey Catalysts, Billingham, UK. It was attended by their researchers from Billingham and Sonning Common, and the group was joined by Sean Rigby from Bath University, a well respected researcher into pore structures. According to Rob Fletcher, who organised it, "the feedback from the audience was very positive". Johnson Matthey purchased version 1.32 of Pore-Cor several years ago, and are now considering how to use the latest version to model various dual porosity catalysts currently under development.

After 6 months of intensive programming, we have finally interrogated the Dinic algorithm which calculates the permeability of the Pore-Cor unit cell. The result is a map of how it thinks the flow is occurring. The example shown on the right is for a test cell, which has deliberately low porosity and high short-range size correlation. The fluid flow is from the top of the unit cell in the negative Cartesian direction (blue) with some flow in +x and +y directions (yellow). Empty voids are red. Note that the flow solution is not a full solution of all the flow through the entire network (which would fill everything to some extent) - it is effectively an automatically pruned solution of the individual flows through the pore-throat pore arcs, each calculated using a parameterised Navier Stokes equation with a slip flow (Klinkenberg) correction. To view the structure in virtual reality, go to the Virtual Reality page, download the flow map and viewer zip file, and read the readme.txt file. See Versions and Modifications for the timescale of availability of this algorithm.

On 11th May Maurizio Laudone successfully defended his PhD thesis, entitled Environmentally Friendly technology: The Behaviour of Natural and Synthetic Binder Systems within Paper Coatings, and was awarded his PhD by Dr Steve IAnson from the School of Materials, University of Manchester and internal examiner Dr Hywel Evans. One publication from the thesis has already been published (Laudone et al 2004), two have been submitted, two more are being drafted, and there are two forthcoming conference presentations in Stockholm and Turku, Finland. So the project has been very fruitful, and Maurizio is now being sponsored for a postdoctoral project on the catalytic and environmental properties of PCC V70 by Dr Patrick Gane , Head of Research and Development, Omya, Oftringen, Switzerland, who also sponsored his PhD.

See also photos of Maurizio with his presentation tankard, and serving drinks.

A second 3-day training course has been held at the University of Plymouth, building on the success of the first course in October 2004. It attracted attendees from the US, France and Poland. It was well received by them - one said that it was 'one of the best such courses I have attended ' - echoing a similar comment made about the first course. For full details of their comments, see the course appraisal.

Click on the photo on the right for a larger version. See also photos of the group, group with title, and course dinner .

See also details of the next course.

Peter Matthews and John Price presented a half-day workshop for the annual conference of the Tectonic Studies Group of the London Geological Society. The photo shows the group in Plymouth, in front of a sadly topical student poster. The group grasped the fundamentals of Pore-Cor RS very quickly. One attendee wished we had more geological examples to show them. It is true that the emphasis of our work recently has been on soil, catalysts and paper coatings. So we are working up a project with ResLabs at the moment, to compare Pore-Cor void size distributions with those obtained from NMR special core analysis. We would also be interested in other collaborations.

For full details of the views of the attendees, see the course appraisal.