Bjarte Matre joined PoreLab on December 9th, 2024, as PhD candidate. His position is financed by PoreLab. His supervisors are Professors Alex Hansen and Carl Fredrik Berg.
Bjarte holds a master’s degree in physics from 2024, specializing in quantum physics, mathematics, and numerical computations. His master’s thesis, titled “Fingerprinting of Quantum Ground State Manifolds” focuses on applying group theory and representation theory to analyze quantum models both analytically and numerically.
Bjarte presents his PhD topic as follow:
The flow of fluids in porous media on large scales is determined by the physics of flow on the pore scale. Simulating flow in individual pores is feasible on small scales, but computationally too intensive on large scales.
My project will focus on deriving large scale behavior from pore scale physics. I will investigate a simplified pore model of two-phase, immiscible, flow where a bubble train of a wetting fluid and less wetting fluid will flow together in a pipe as bubbles. The pipe will enter a T-junction splitting the flow in two and will be joined again into a single pipe. This structure will be repeated, creating a simple one-dimensional model for a porous medium. This simplified model may be extended to a two-dimensional mesh where the findings of the one-dimensional model may help analyze this more complex system.