Florian successfully defended his Ph.D thesis and delivered the obligatory flower bouquet to the Gaenseliesel statue. Congratulations!
His work has been a combination of extensive laboratory experiments, field work and analytical modeling to enhance the understanding of fracture-matrix interaction under partially saturated conditions. While unfortunately most of his Ph.D. has been affected by the Covid pandemic and consequently limitations both at work and in social life, Florian has produced impressive results based on his meticulously designed laboratory fracture-analogue experiments. Despite the ongoing research in the field of infiltration dynamics in porous-fractured media, since the late 90s and after the peak of the Yucca mountain a lot of unsolved questions remain. Florian has demonstrated that various assumptions of transfer functions are violated and classical modeling approaches often do not capture the true processes in such systems both on short and longer time scales. His experiments and analysis provide a new perspective on this classical topic and we hope that his results will be useful for other researchers in the future.
Florian Rüdiger PhD