Prof. Dr. Erik H. Saenger
Principal Investigator
Erik H. Saenger is since 2014 a Professor of Reservoir Engineering and Rock Physics at the Hochschule Bochum and a private lecturer (Venia Legendi) at the Ruhr University Bochum. He did both his undergraduate and post graduate work in physics and geophysics at the University of Karlsruhe (Germany) and has over 18 years of academic experience since receiving his doctorate degree. He worked from 2001 to 2006 as a post doctoral researcher at the Freie Universitaet Berlin (Germany) as the leader of the numerical rock physics group. From 2006 to 2012 he was a scientific consultant for Spectraseis; from 2007 to 2014 he worked as a research scientist at the Geological Institute at ETH Zurich.
His research interests include scale-dependent estimation of effective elastic properties of fractured and porous rocks, fluid effects on wave propagation, passive seismic data, geothermal applications, and development and implementation of various finite difference approaches to model wave propagation in anisotropic and viscoelastic media. He is Associate Editor of Geophysics.
Martin Balcewicz, M.Sc.
Research Associate
Martin Balcewicz is a research assistant at the Bochum University of Applied Sciences in the Reservoir Engineering and Rock Physics research group and a PhD student of the Institute of Geology, Mineralogy and Geophysics at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum (RUB). His ongoing Ph.D. thesis “Characteristic material properties influenced by fractures: From geology to non-destructive testing“ is supervised by Prof. Dr. Erik H. Saenger and Prof. Dr. Holger Steeb. Focused on structural geology and tectonics, Martin finished the M.Sc. program in Geosciences at the RUB (2019) as well as his B.Sc. (2016).
In addition to his experience as a structural geologist in the field, Martin Balcewicz has developed skills in laboratory experiments and X-ray Computed Tomography (XRCT) in recent years. Therefore, he is able to select suitable samples for upcoming laboratory experiments and to link these laboratory results with subsequent numerical modeling. For this purpose, Martin is developing a so-called digital twin, in which he assigns physical rock properties to individual material particles in a location-dependent volume. His main interest is the relationship between the properties of fractured and porous rocks and their scale dependence.
