Personal News
The academic year started with a devastating event for Dr. Azra Tutuncu with the passing of Dr. Ali I. Mese, her 40-year best friend and 35-year beloved husband. She would like to take this opportunity to thank all their friends in Houston and Denver and our Mines family for their tremendous support to withstand this big loss.
Dr. Winterfeld and family attended the graduation of his youngest son Andrew, who received a B.A. in neuro- science at CU Boulder.
Dr. Fan has settled down in Lakewood near Green Mountain.
Dr. Prasad gets to move her office across the road to the Green Center as she moves to join the Geophysics department. The decision to change departments was a hard one, but thankfully we’ll still be able to see and collaborate with her.
Dr. Battalora still loves her Boston Terrier Daisy, who is now 1.5 years old.
Dr. Winterfeld and family at his son’s graduation.
Research News
CalFrac has donated several equipment to PE. The company left the Denver area and dropped cement- ing services to focus in hydraulic fracturing, and de- cided to get rid of its cementing equipment. Dr. Sam- paio worked with CalFrac and the donated instruments were delivered in late fall 2018. They include a curing cell, High Pressure High Temperature Consistometer, Ultra-high Temperature Ultrasonic Cement Analyzer, HPHT Viscometer, Atmospheric Consistometer, HPHT Filter press, Constant Speed Mixer and an Instrument Viscometer. These instruments retail for around $400k and are in excellent conditions. Most will serve for re- search once we finish installing all of them.
FAST is celebrating its 15th anniversary this year and continues to be one of the department’s largest re- search groups. Currently 9 PhD and 2 MS students are working on projects including topics such as proppant transport in fractures and horizontal wellbores, well-to- well hydraulic fracture interference, machine learning, and fiber-optics applications to stimulation.
During its 15-year history, FAST has graduated 24 MS’s and 13 PhD’s (hi to all of the FAST alums out there), pub- lished over 50 papers, and has become known as one of the leading university research programs in hydraulic fracturing and stimulation technology. FAST currently
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has ten member companies that actively participate in the two semi-annual meetings, however, we are always looking for new companies to join and provide their in- put and needs in the area of stimulation. New projects are suggested by the member companies and voted on by all members to be pursued or not. If you would like to join FAST or find out more information about it, please see the website at www.mines.edu/fast/ or contact Dr. Jennifer Miskimins (jmiskimi@mines.edu).
Dr. Miskimins worked with NREL on geothermal hy- draulic fracturing modeling for the Sigma V geothermal project taking place in South Dakota. She is also work- ing with Encana on a proppant transport and perfora- tion distribution project, and just starting working with Crestone Peak Resources on a refracturing project.
We continue our plot to take over the Edgar Mine with Dr. Miskimins installing a fiber-optics instrumented hor- izontal well in conjunction with Dr. Ali Tura, Geophysics.
Drs. Tutuncu, Kazemi and Yin started a new, 2-year re- search project, funded by RIPED, titled “Microscale flow mechanism characterization and numerical simulation of ultra-low permeability reservoirs”.
https://www.mines.edu/fast/ mailto:jmiskimi@mines.edu