We are pleased to announce a major upgrade to the many features of PoreXY, the free pre-processor for mercury porosimetry measured by a wide range of instruments.

The new upgrade detects if there is a bulge – namely the extrusion curve rising about 100% of the total intrusion as the pressure is reduced from its maximum.  The bulge is due to thermal heating effects, and invalidates both the extrusion and intrusion curve.  So please download the new, free upgrade to PoreXY from this website – you will find it very useful whether or not you use PoreXpert.

We send you very best wishes for this festive season. Happy experimenting – look out for the bulge !

PoreXpert has been successfully tested, with no problems encountered, on Windows 11.

Professor Kip Jeffrey of the Camborne School of Mines, University of Exeter, has been using the main sections of PoreXpert over many days of CPU time to increase his understanding of a large database of limestones.  He emailed us to say that “I think the software is awesome and enjoyed getting to grips with … it”.

We are pleased to announce the full release of PoreXY, after extensive testing of the beta release version.  It is a mercury porosimetry data pre-processor, available without a licence, free of charge after registering on this website.

Where appropriate according to the datafile, automatically input from a wide range of porosimeters, it

• subtracts blank runs,
• corrects porosity estimates,
• corrects for sample solid phase compressibility and calculates the sample’s solid phase bulk modulus,
• allows the user to trim the top and bottom of the intrusion curve if necessary, and
• thins the data so that the intrusion points are more equally spaced along the logarithmically scaled intrusion curve.

The benefits of these operations are described and exemplified in the on-line user manual.

Even if you do not use PoreXpert routinely, PoreXY can be useful. Quality control (but not void size estimation) can be carried by taking the first derivative (slope) of the intrusion curve, usually plotted with a logarithmic pressure (or size) axis. PoreXY outputs fewer and more equally spaced points, and therefore leads to easier measures of slope.

In response to requests from our current users, a new update has been released.  It includes improved stability for remote working in a corporate environment, further automation of the identification of void clusters, corrected data handling for non-English environments, and better display of results on the Operations list.  A full list of changes is shown on the Change Log page.  The installer for the update (version 2-1-710) can be downloaded via the User Pages , and there are full instructions on the Software support > Installation page.

Are you trying to understand the behaviour of pore fluids in a material in which voids of all sizes, from nanopores to macropores, are completely mixed up and inter-dependent ?  Are you flummoxed as to how to study nanopores when mercury porosimetry cannot get to a high enough pressure to intrude them ?  Or are you trying to improve on the current crude models used to calculate relative permeability ? Then take a look at the PowerPoint presentation that we gave to the Royal Society of Chemistry Porous Materials Interest Group in Glasgow, UK in June, available from the Downloads > Applications page.  Extra text has been added to compensate for the absence of an oral commentary, and for your entertainment it includes two movies – one a trip through a real tight-oil shale from a fracking reservoir measured using FIB-SEM as illustrated, and another a trip through a PoreXpert virtual pore network.

We are pleased to announce the arrival of PoreXY, the new data pre-processor for PoreXpert.  It allows you to trim and thin your data to make it suitable for direct entry into PoreXpert, and also gives you the bulk modulus of the solid phase of your sample.  The beta release is available free of charge to all current users of PoreXpert – just log in as a website user, and download the installer.  Full details are available from its Help system.

Prof. Peter Matthews is giving a presentation at the Royal Society of Chemistry Porous Materials conference in Glasgow, UK, 13th and 14th  June, entitled ‘Nanopores integrated with macropores:  modelling weight loss in nuclear reactor cores and the relative permeability of tight-oil shale’.  It will describe the latest developments and applications of PoreXpert, which are also applicable to other complex porous materials. View the abstract here.

In response to a request from a current user who is modelling 40 samples with large (25x25x25) unit cells, additional batch files have been uploaded to the Downloads | Batch files table.

Inverse modelling tends to amplify any errors, so on-line training is highly recommended.  We have just completed our latest course, which according to the client provided “extremely informative and detailed training”.  Please see the Software Support | Training page for details.