Robin Gerlach

There has been a long-standing collaboration between the work groups of Holger Class and Rainer Helmig in Stuttgart and the group of Al Cunningham and Robin Gerlach at the Center for Biofilm Engineering of the Montana State University. The intensive scientific exchange resulted in a number of high-ranked joint publications.

The experiments within Project Area C focus on porosity-permeability relations and will partly be conducted with the Center for Biofilm Engineering. In collaboration with Al Cunningham and Robin Gerlach dynamic changes in porosity and associated changes in pore-water-velocity distributions with MRI and XRCT in order to determine permeability changes will be investigated. Experiments on salt precipitation during evaporation and Microbially-Induced Calcite Precipitation (MICP) in porous glass-bead systems will be carried out using micro-fluidic cells.

In the Center for Biofilm Engineering, there is an outstanding experimental facility which will be of great use for Research Project C04.