NSF/CBMS Regional Conference in the Mathematical Sciences - "Mathematical and Numerical Treatment of Fluid Flow and Transport in Porous Media" - "May 23-27, 2006"

研究和理解地球内部和周围发生的复杂的物理和化学过程，如地下水污染、油藏生产、发现新的石油储量、海洋流体动力学和空气质量控制，对我们的生活环境、经济发展和自然资源管理至关重要。通过物理实验、数学理论和计算技术来研究上述问题，需要工程师、数学家、计算科学家和其他在工业、政府实验室和大学工作的研究人员之间的跨学科合作。通过将这些研究人员聚集在一起，可以在预测、理解和优化这些问题中出现的许多复杂现象方面取得有意义的进展。这个为期五天的区域研究会议的目的是举办讲座，汇集主要思想和最新成果，并为多孔介质中流体流动和输送的数学和数值处理绘制未来的方向。本次研究会议集中讨论了几个具有基础科学价值和重要应用价值的重要课题。多孔介质中的多相流动和输运通常导致非线性、时变偏微分方程（PDEs）的耦合系统。由于存在多时空尺度、非线性效应以及需要进行大尺度和异常长时间的模拟，这些偏微分方程的数值解具有很大的挑战性。召开拟议中的区域会议肯定会促进我们对这些具有挑战性的问题的理解和解决。会议将确保与会者，特别是那些新近进入多孔介质流体流动和输送领域的人，对过去二十年来发展起来的主要突出问题和最先进的技术有一个更好和快速的了解。考虑到仍在进行的尤卡山项目（由能源部资助）距离内华达大学拉斯维加斯分校仅100英里，这次会议将为增加当地的研究活动提供强有力的刺激。此外，本次会议所涵盖的主题将有益于许多其他相关领域，如机械工程、地球科学、石油工程和计算科学。

The need to study and understand the complex physical and chemical processes occurring in and around the earth, such as groundwater contamination, oil reservoir production, discovering new oil reserves, ocean hydrodynamics, and air quality control, is vital to our living environment, economic development, andnatural resource management.The study of the above problems through physical experiments, mathematical theory, and computational techniques requires interdisciplinary collaboration between engineers, mathematicians, computational scientists, and other researchers working in industry, government laboratories, and universities. By bringing together such researchers, meaningful progress can be made in predicting, understanding, and optimizing many complex phenomena that occur in these problems. The aim of this five-day regionalresearch conference is to hold lectures that pull together the major ideas and recent results and chart the future directions for the mathematical and numerical treatment of fluid flow and transport in porous media.This research conference focuses on several important topics that have fundamental scientific merits and significant application values. Multiphase flow and transport in porous media usually leads to coupled systems of nonlinear, time-dependent partial differential equations (PDEs). Numerical solutions of these PDEs are very challenging due to multiple temporal and spatial scales presented, nonlinear effects, and large scale and unusual long time simulations needed. Holding the proposed regional conference will definitelyadvance our understanding and solving those challenging problems.The conference will ensure that participants, especially those new or recent entrants to fluid flow and transport in porous media, gain a better and quick understanding of major outstanding problems and the state-of-the-art techniques developed in the past two decades. The conference will provide a strong stimulus for increased local research activity, considering that the still ongoing Yucca Mountain Project (funded by Department of Energy) is just located 100 miles away from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Furthermore, the subjects covered in this conference will benefit many other related fields such as mechanical engineering, geosciences, petroleum engineering, and computational sciences.