FACULTY NEWS
Awards and Recognition
• The Enger Teaching award went to Dr. Bill Eustes in fall 2020 and
Dr. Mansur Ermila in spring 2021.
• The Mines Alumni Board of Directors gives out awards every fall,
and in fall 2020 several PE alumni were recognized. More details
about the awards and recipients are at https://weare.mines.
edu/s/840/19/interior.aspx?sid=840&gid=1&pgid=465 .
° Outstanding Alumnus Award: Barry Thomas ’91. This award
recognizes an alumnus/na who has contributed meritorious
service on behalf of Mines.
° Academic Support Award: William Fleckenstein ’86, ME ’88,
PhD ‘00. This award is given each year to a member of the Mines
community who goes above and beyond to support the rigor of
a Mines education.
° Young Alumna of the Year Award: Jordan Hopper ‘14. This award
is presented to a recent graduate whose accomplishments have
reflected favorably on the school and are actively involved in
their alumni community.
° M Club Leader of the Year: Alyse Keller ’15. This award recognizes
alumni who are M Club Leaders in their area and go the extra
mile to support Mines and their fellow Orediggers.
Research Tidbits
• A new research grant for 2021, entitled “Simulation test of fracture
initiation and propagation”, was funded by CNPC-USA. It will be
led by Drs. Yu-Shu Wu and Phil Winterfeld on further development
and enhancement of hydraulic fracture simulator.
• Drs. Yu-Shu Wu and Phil Winterfeld developed a new theory on
multicomponent diffusion model, representing a breakthrough
in theoretical study of mass transport in porous media, and
published in the SPE Journal .
• Dr. Fleckenstein leads a multi-disciplinary team who was awarded a
$4.8 million DOE grant to develop tools for harvesting geothermal
energy. The Utah FORGE project will be based on some existing
patents (see below).
• Years of work have paid off and this year two patents were
awarded. The first was developed by Drs. Fleckenstein and Eustes
on a Method and apparatus to rotate subsurface wellbore casing
( https://patents.justia.com/patent/10961791 ). On the second
Dr. Fleckenstein led a team which was Downhole tractor for use in
a wellbore ( https://patents.justia.com/patent/10927625 ).
• Dr. Yilin Fan received a grant from the American Chemical
Society Petroleum Research Fund in 2020. The research is about
“Experimental Investigation of Droplet Size Distribution in Water-
in-Oil Emulsion in Air and Emulsion Multipahse Horizontal Pipe
Flow.”
• Dr. Winterfeld is finishing project entitled “Laboratory and
modeling studies of cryogenic fracturing/cooling processes
around boreholes with liquid nitrogen.” Newcrest Mining’s Lihir
gold mine, in Papua, New Guinea, is in a seismically active area
and the ground is hot due to this activity. Part of the gold mining
MS student Mohammad Airlangga in Dr. Xiaolong Yin’s
group recently measured
the total gas stored in
a nanosilicate material
called MCM-41. Left is the pressure vessel used to make measurements and below is
the experiment schematic.
process is to drill boreholes and place explosives into them for detonation. The hot ground causes thermal degradation of the explosives, and we are studying minimizing this degradation by injecting liquid nitrogen into the boreholes in order to cool them.
• Dr. Winterfeld is working on project entitled: “Software Upgrade
and Algorithm Research on Three-Dimensional Hydraulic
Fracturing Propagation Model” for China National Petroleum
Corporation where we will upgrade Frac-CSM, the three-
dimensional fracturing simulator, and optimize the numerical
algorithm for fracture propagation modeling including improving
the speed of the simulator by increasing the code efficiency,
improving the linear equation solution speed, parallelizing the
code with either MPI and OPEN-MP, and improving the fracture
mechanics formulation by implementing the three-dimensional
Displacement Discontinuity Method for fracture width and
induced stress calculations.
• Dr. Kazemi had four students defend and graduate over the
summer. Their thesis topics span a wide variety of subjects—
experiments involving low-cost ketones to enhance oil recovery
(Etaf Alghunaim), analytical evaluation of a shale reservoir
performance in the DJ Basin (Balnur Mindygaliyeva and
Nurbol Bekbossinov),and testing a practical matrix refinement
computer code for use in low-permeability fractured reservoirs
(Sarah Alruwayi). Research for his current advisees involved
laboratory experiments to compare performance of synthetic
low-permeability cores vs. reservoir cores (Asm Kamruzzaman),
geologic and engineering assessment of Permian Basin reservoirs
(Ozan Uzun), numerical and engineering assessment of a gas-
condensate region in Eagle Ford (Kaveh Amini), and experimental
measurement of relative permeability in fractured carbonate
reservoirs (Daulet Gaziz).
PETROLEUM .MINES. EDU
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https://petroleum.mines.edu/ https://weare.mines.edu/s/840/19/interior.aspx?sid=840&gid=1&pgid=465 https://weare.mines.edu/s/840/19/interior.aspx?sid=840&gid=1&pgid=465 https://patents.justia.com/patent/10961791 https://patents.justia.com/patent/10927625