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

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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.