Kalpana Katti, University Distinguished Professor of civil engineering, presented an invited plenary lecture at the Biot-5 conference in Vienna, Austria, in July. The presentation, titled “FTIR investigation of molecular interactions in swelling clays and their role on swelling and other macroscopic properties,” was co-written by Dinesh R. Katti, professor and interm chair of the Department of Civil Engineering.
In the lecture, Kalpana demonstrated novel use of infrared spectroscopy in measurement of flow through nanosized and sub-nanosized porosities in clays, a method developed by the Katti’s research group at NDSU. Measurement of flow through porous media is important for energy exploration, to understand nutrient transport in biological tissues, for biomedical applications such as drug delivery, to evaluate movement of fluid through soils near and at landfills and also various environmental applications.
The technique developed by the Katti group enables measurement of flowrates through nanoscale-mesoscale porosities using a combination of advanced infrared spectroscopic techniques with atomic force microscopy phase imaging. The experiments were conducted in the Advanced Materials Laboratory in the civil engineering department.
The Biot conferences are named after Maurice Anthony Biot, the founder of the field that is referred to as Biot theory of poroelasticity. The field has unparalleled impact on a wide variety of disciplines, including civil and biomedical engineering, biology, geophysics, acoustics and materials science, according to Kalpana Katti.
The first Biot conference on Poromechanics was held in 1998 at Biot’s alma mater, the Université catholique de Louvain in Belgium. The 2013 Biot-5 Conference commemorated the “grandfather" of poromechanics, Karl von Terzaghi, at the Technical University in Vienna, the location of Terzaghi’s first full professorship appointment before moving to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
NDSU is recognized as one of the nation’s top 108 public and private universities by the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education.