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Three main directions:
(A) The development of new geostatistical methods and their applications in mineral resources exploration, environmental monitoring, and GIS mapping functions.
(B) The application of geostatistical and statistical physics techniques in stochastic hydrology.
(C) The investigation of the impact of heterogeneity on the mechanical properties of porous materials such as advanced ceramics.
A. Geostatistics
In a nutshell, Geostatistics aims to analyze the spatial structure of variability in natural processes and to use the information for simulating and estimating the expected behavior of natural phenomena at locations (or times) that are not accessible for measurement.
More specifically, dealing with the following topics:
Development Spartan Spatial Random Field Models for geostatistical applications. In the spirit of the Gibbs-Markov random fields, I have constructed interaction-based random fields, which I named Spartan due to their frugal parametric needs (Hristopulos 2003b; 2004b).
Development of SSRF predictors based on local error definition (Hristopulos, 2005a).
Systematic methods for identifying geometric anisotropy (Hristopulos 2002; 2004a).
Formulation of non-Gaussian Spartan random field models.
Application of SSRF models in environmental risk assessment, mining resources evaluation & exploitation studies, and GIS advanced functions.
B. Hydrology
Efforts focus on modelling the effects of spatial variability in porous media at various scales, and especially in the calculation of coarse-grained parameters of transport properties such as fluid permeability and macro-dispersivity.
Specific interests include the following topics:
The application of renormalization group (RG) methods in the calculation of effective parameters (Hristopulos and Christakos, 1999; Hristopulos, 2003a).
Investigating the effects of anisotropy on the fluid permeability tensor.
Connections between morphological and stochastic models of porous media.
The development of new methods for modelling the heterogeneity in porous media that could incorporate higher-order structural information.
C. Ceramic Materials
This work is carried out in collaboration with the Laboratory of Ceramics and Glass Technology, and it is funded by the European project "Activation".
Research in ceramics focuses on the following:
Modelling of sintering processes in nano-grained ceramic materials, with special interest on the effects of mechanical activation (Hristopulos et al., 2005).
Investigating the impact of structural disorder (i.e., of the complex pore space) on the mechanical properties of the materials.
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