Events & News

• April 2009 - New Research Center Announced: The Center for Frontiers of Subsurface Energy Security (CFSES) was announced in late April. Dr. Gary Pope will be the director of the new research center. Funding for the center comes as part of the Energy Frontier Research Center (EFRC) Awards from the Department of Energy's Office of Science. CPGE, in partnership with UT's Jackson School of Geology, UT's Institute for Computational Engineering, and Sandia National Labs will receive approximately $15.5 million over a five-year period. The goal of the center is to explain the movement or transport of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in geological systems. Please see the official press release (PDF document) or the EFRC page for more info on this historic research opportunity.
• Dr. Martin Vohralik from Université Pierre et Marie Curie (Paris 6), will be visiting CSM for four weeks beginning May 11, 2009.
• Dr. Ethan Kubatko from The Ohio State University, will be visiting CSM for two weeks beginning June 29, 2009.
• We are pleased to announce that Professor Mary F. Wheeler was selected as Fellow of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) for her outstanding contributions to the fields served by SIAM.
• We are pleased to announce that Professor Mary F. Wheeler has been selected the winner of the 2009 SIAM Theodore von Kármán Prize, one of SIAM's most distinguished prizes, and the SIAM SIAG/GS Career Prize. The von Kármán Prize will be awarded at the SIAM annual meeting in Denver in July.
• We are pleased to announce that Professor Mary F. Wheeler, "Reservoir Characterization and Evaluation of Long Term CO2 Storage in Saline Aquifers" has been selected the winner W.A. “Tex” Moncrief, Jr. Simulation-Based Engineering and Sciences (SBES) Grand Challenge Faculty Awards for the 2009-2010 academic year.
• CSM will begin a collaboration with the Centre for Mathematics at the University of Coimbra, Portugal, in April 2009 to study reaction-diffusion in porous media.
• We are pleased to announce that Dr. Mary Wheeler, Dr. Todd Arbogast and Dr. Mojdeh Delshad have been awarded a KAUST Collaboration Research Grant (CRG) to investigate multiscale and multiphysics algorithms for the simulation of multiphase flow and transport coupled with geochemical reactions and geomechanical deformation in porous media.
• We are pleased to announce that Dr. Mary Wheeler, Dr. Todd Arbogast and Dr. Mojdeh Delshad have been awarded a Cyber-Enabled Discovery and Innovation (CDI) grant from the National Science Foundation to investigate computational models for long term CO2 storage in saline aquifers.

The Center for Subsurface Modeling (CSM) investigates high-performance parallel processing as a tool to model the behavior of fluids in permeable geologic formations such as petroleum and natural gas reservoirs, groundwater aquifers and aquitards, and in shallow bodies of water such as bays and estuaries. The Center is part of the Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences (ICES). CSM comprises a close-knit team of faculty and research scientists with expertise in applied mathematics, engineering, and computer, physical, chemical and geological sciences. This interdisciplinary approach to simulation permits a more effective integration of advanced mathematical and numerical techniques with engineering applications.

Research Spotlight

CSM offers researchers the ability to collaborate on projects that address the growing use of computers to simulate physical events and the use of these simulations to study physical phenomena and to perform engineering analysis and design.

A short course on the mechanics of porous media

Y.M. Leroy
Laboratoire de Géologie, CNRS, École Normale Supérieure, Paris, France.

This course consists of six lectures presenting recent advances in theory of porous media, with the emphasis on phenomena operating at disparate length and time scales. The topics will include:

• Introduction to poro-elasticity and its applications to post-seismic rebound, compaction and subsidence.
• Stress-enhanced dissolution/precipitation.
• Compaction and transport.
• Stability and poro-plasticity.

Lectures:
Lecture 1
Lecture 2
Lecture 3
Lecture 4
Lecture 5
Lecture 6

References:
Rice J.R., Continuum mechanics and thermodynamics of plasticity in relation to microscale deformation mechanisms,
Chap 2 of Constitutive equations in plasticity, Edited by A.S. Argon, MIT Press, 1975.
Rice J.R. and Cleary M.P., Some basic stress diffusion solutions for fluid-saturated elastic porous media with compressible
constituents, Reviews of Geophysics and Space Physics, 227–241, 1976.
Mechanics of fluid-saturated rocks, Edited by Y. Guéguen and m. Boutéca, Elsevier, 2004.
Theory of linear poro-elasticity, H.F. Wang, Princeton University Press, 2000.

Brochure 2008-2009