Alex Hansen - Böcker

An invaluable reference for graduate students and academic researchers, this book introduces the basic terminology, methods and theory of the physics of flow in porous media. Geometric concepts, such as percolation and fractals, are explained and simple simulations are created, providing readers with both the knowledge and the analytical tools to deal with real experiments. It covers the basic hydrodynamics of porous media and how complexity emerges from it, as well as establishing key connections between hydrodynamics and statistical physics. Covering current concepts and their uses, this book is of interest to applied physicists and computational/theoretical Earth scientists and engineers seeking a rigorous theoretical treatment of this topic. Physics of Flow in Porous Media fills a gap in the literature by providing a physics-based approach to a field that is mostly dominated by engineering approaches.

Gathering research from physics, mechanical engineering, and statistics in a single resource for the first time, this text presents the background to the model, its theoretical basis, and applications ranging from materials science to earth science.The authors start by explaining why disorder is important for fracture and then go on to introduce the fiber bundle model, backed by various different applications. Appendices present the necessary mathematical, computational and statistical background required.The structure of the book allows the reader to skip some material that is too specialized, making this topic accessible to the engineering, mechanics and materials science communities, in addition to providing further reading for graduate students in statistical physics.

There have been considerable advances in recent times in understanding many common material processes that are of practical importance, such as nonlinear response, fracture, breakdown, earthquakes, packing, and granular flow, that are of immense practical importance. This has been mainly due to new applications of statistical physics, including percolation theory, fractal concepts and self-organized criticality. This collection of articles brings together research in those closely allied fields. It deals with problems in material science involving random geometries and nonlinearity at a mesoscopic scale, where local disorder and nonlinearity influence the global behaviour of cracks, for example, and problems where randomness in time evolution is as crucial as the geometry itself.