"Within work package 1 ""Coordination, management and dissemination"", the Partnership Agreement was implemented, a kick-off meeting and an international conference and summer school were organsised. Regular communication among partners and with the public was organised through the emails, meetings and a website. Conferences, lectures, reports and scientific articles allowed the dissemination of the project results.
The work package 2 is the first scientific work package, entitled: “Understanding today’s best practice across discipline”. By reviewing our expertise and the current state-of-the-art through extensive literature search, we could develop adequate experimental protocols, modified CT scanning methods, image processing practices and modelling approaches. The biggest events during this work package was the organisation of our 1st international workshop in Grenoble ( July 2015), the 2nd one being held in Auckland, New Zealand ( January 2016), and the generation of a technical report on best practices in CT scanning, image analysis, soil experiments and modelling.
The work package 3 entitles “Implement multi/trans-disciplinary protocols”. The objectives were to confront restrictions, limitations and requirements in each discipline. We especially confronted each discipline by coupling Imaging and Analysis, Modelling and Theory, Analysis and modelling, and Theory and Modelling. To complete the 4 tasks listed in Work Package 3, following key experiments were selected to test these protocols=.
This work package was also a strong year for lectures and training. The largest event was the organisation of our first summer school in Grenoble-France (18-20 July). This three days summer school aimed at presenting up to date practices and methodologies used for 3D or 3+1D (3 spaces and 1 temporal dimensions) observations of porous media. We also organised lectures for postgraduate students of the Computer Science Department at The University of Auckland (New Zealand) in January 2016, at the Geology Institute at la UNAM, Mexico, and at Kumamoto University (Japan).
The work package 4 entitles ""Create a unified trans-disciplinary approach "". A detailed protocol for acquiring and analysing images was proposed for void and soil organic matter localization. New data analysis algorithms (segmentation, characterisation) integrating a priori knowledge (structure, heterogeneity) were tested. Two-dimensional pore-scale numerical model was developed to investigate the main mechanisms governing biofilm growth in porous media and results of the numerical simulation were presented. An emphasis was put on applying fundamental concepts of fluid mechanics, thermic and contaminant transport to simulate transport phenomenon in the pore volume of soils.
During WP4, series of master and PhD courses in Grenoble, Kumamoto, Mexico and Auckland, were organised on image analysis techniques, multiscale approaches and upscaling and soil physics, mechanistic and stochastic modelling approaches for transfer in porous media. In July 2017, an international workshop in Kumamoto was co-organised between PROTINUS and IROAST which allowed all PROTINUS partners to present their work.
In the last work package (WP5), we tested and validated our unified protocols investigated in WP #3 and developed in WP#4 and new computational models using outcomes of experiments completed in WP#2 and #4, with analysis techniques discussed in WP #2 and improved in WP#3. The different steps were presented during our spring school in Bologna in march 2018 and is also being published in a special issue on PROTINUS in Soil Research special issue which is going to be published mid
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