Our latest consultancy involved modelling sintered aluminium castings, which had modified properties. Pore-Cor revealed quantitatively the changes in the numbers of pores and throats, of specified sizes, caused by the modifications. The customers are delighted and are putting the results into their literature.

Pore-Cor has been successfully used at the Silsoe Research Institute to model the difference between the rhizospheric soil granules beneath barley, wheat and maize. The results have been submitted for publication. In this case, as in many other, the modelling has not only revealed interesting effects, but also acted as a driver for improved experimental data. Because Pore-Cor carries out a point-by-point fit, gaps between data points cannot be smoothed over by curves such as those of Van Genuchten or Brooks Corey. It highlights in particular that there is a need for very low tension measurements for water retention, near the gravity drainage region, which previously have been overlooked.

Paul Bodurtha visited the laboratories of SCA, Sundsvall, Sweden for two months to help them with their use of Pore-Comp, which is essential for the correction of mercury intrusion curves for paper coatings. SCA's regular use of the software in their laboratories revealed several improvements which can be made to the software to make it easier to use in a quality control environment. These will be programmed into the full release version.

In September, Paul flew south to Lund to visit Catator. This company had had major problems with Pore-Cor version 1.32. It turned out that they had been told, mistakenly, that the output from a Micromeritics porosimeter could be adapted to put into Pore-Cor simply by changing the file extension to .rpt . In fact, the porosimeter must be commanded to output a file with this extension. Even then there is a choice of two formats - although Pore-Cor will automatically advise if the wrong one has been chosen, and there are plenty of details about this in the Help files. Catator also had problems with the graphics on Pore-Cor v 1.32 which would not work properly on their Intel graphics card, which was too crude a card. The graphics in Pore-Cor Research Suite are less demanding on the graphics card, but more demanding the computer as a whole - it is essential to have at least a 600 MHz computer,and plenty of RAM space. Larger structures can only be viewed with a 1 GHz machine with 128 MBytes of RAM.

By the end of the visit, Catator were impressed with the results of the new software, which has successfully modelled bi-modal intrusion curves, derived from catalysts used on applications such as catalytic convertors for motorbikes. They particularly liked being able to view the structures and fluids in Virtual Reality.