[Aspuru-Guzik group list] [IACS-events] IACS Seminar Friday, November 2: Margot Gerritsen (Stanford University) on A Computational Engineer Combusts

Date: Friday, November 2, 2012 Speaker: Margot Gerritsen, Associate Professor of Energy Resources and Engineering & Director of the Institute for Computational and Mathematical Engineering, Stanford University Location: Maxwell-Dworkin G125, 33 Oxford Street, Cambridge, MA 02138 Time: Informal lunch with speaker, 12:30pm. Talk, 1:00pm. Title: A Computational Engineer Combusts Abstract: Large-scale production of very heavy oil is gaining momentum. Unfortunately, production of such reservoirs typically leads to large environmental impacts. One promising technique that may mitigate these impacts is in-situ combustion (ISC). In this process, (enriched) air is injected into the reservoir. After ignition a combustion front develops in situ that burns a small percentage of the oil in place and slowly moves through the reservoir producing steam along the way. The steam moves ahead of the front, heats up the oil, makes it runnier and hence easier to produce. A side benefit of this process is that the heat thus generated often cracks the oil into heavy, undesirable components that stay behind in the reservoir and lighter, more valuable components that can be brought up to the surface. In the last few years, my colleagues and I plunged into heavy oil recovery to see if computational mathematics could make a difference in pushing this process over less environmentally friendly processes in the industry. ISC processes are notoriously hard to predict. We developed a workflow involving laboratory experiments, various simulation tools and upscaling methods that increases the confidence of the oil reservoir engineer in ISC. We hope that this will lead to a wider acceptance and use of this technique. Bio: Margot Gerritsen is a professor in the Department of Energy Resources Engineering at Stanford and director of the Institute for Computational and Mathematical Engineering (icme.stanford.edu<http://icme.stanford.edu/>)/>). Her work is about understanding and simulating complicated fluid flow problems. Gerritsen's research focuses on the design of highly accurate and efficient parallel computational methods to predict the performance of enhanced oil recovery methods, with particular attention to gas injection and in-situ combustion processes. These recovery methods are extremely challenging to simulate because of the very strong nonlinearities in the governing equations. Outside petroleum engineering, she is active in coastal ocean simulation with colleagues from the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, yacht research and pterosaur flight mechanics with colleagues from the Department of Mechanical and Aeronautical Engineering, and the design of search algorithms in collaboration with the Library of Congress and colleagues from the Institute of Computational and Mathematical Engineering. For information about the future events at IACS, see http://iacs.seas.harvard.edu/events. _______________________________________________ Iacs-events mailing list Iacs-events(a)seas.harvard.edu https://lists.seas.harvard.edu/mailman/listinfo/iacs-events