The world of porous media
The TryScience SFB 1313 Workshop „Environmental Engineering, Mathematics and SimTech“ on 29th October 2018 was a great success. 22 students from different schools participated at the workshop and got an exclusive insight view into three different disciplines and research areas. The workshop consisted of two parts, connected in content.
The first part explained the world of porous media. What are porous media? Where do we find porous media in our everyday lives? Why is there an entire collaborative research centre, researching them more closely? After a theoretical introduction, the students were able to get a more detailed picture of different porous media and their
properties during four different experiments:
1) Experiment on porosity
2) Experiment on capillary forces
3) Experiment on permeability
4) Experiment on transport in a porous medium
After the demonstrative experiments, the students were guided through the experimental hall of the Institute for Modelling Hydraulic and Environmental Systems, where the researchers carry out real experiments.
The second part of the workshop dealt with theoretical mathematics and modelling. On the basis of the experiment on transport in a porous medium (4), the students got to know the Darcy’s law, an mathematical equation named after the French engineer Henry Darcy, that describes the flow of a fluid through a porous medium. Using this equation, the students were able to understand how to calculate the flow velocity in a porous medium. On a computational model, they were able to change various parameters and thus simultaneously recognize how the flow velocity of the model changed.
TryScience
The TryScience workshops of the University of Stuttgart offer the possibility to get to know various courses of study and research areas. Students of the higher high school grades can experience first-hand how exciting STEM studies can be. Numerous institutes open their doors so that students get an idea what they could eventually study after their degrees.
