Earth Resources Engineering
Efficient and responsible use of Earth's energy, water, and mineral resources
Discoveries and impact
- Development of rigorous analytical solutions, asymptotic models, and computational treatments of the fluid-driven fracture problem
- Development of the first discrete element method and advanced boundary element techniques
- Expanded renewable energy to fluvial or tidal environments
- Scaled uniform momentum zones in turbulent boundary layers
- Development of the Analytic Element Method (AEM) catering for the simulation of of groundwater flow
- Unearthing of fundamental mechanisms causing stick-slip vibrations in deep drilling systems
- Analysis of acoustic emission toward the identification of damage and fracture of quasibrittle materials
- Development of fast inverse solutions for 3D seismic imaging
Our Research
- Modeling of groundwater flow
- Developing analytic elements and implementing them in computer models for modeling both groundwater flow and the deformation of rock
- Creating simplified vertically integrated groundwater flow models to address water supply issues with a minimum of data
- Modeling of coastal aquifers
- Understanding factors affecting the propagation of hydraulic fractures in weak poorly consolidated rocks
- Developing models to design and control directional drilling system
- Predicting the stability limit between whirling and stick-slip self-excited vibrations of drilling systems
- Pursuing sustainable development, natural resources recovery and management, clean energy
- Evaluating the drained and undrained response of fluid-saturated rock with applications to geologic carbon storage
- Developing an experimental apparatus for measuring the constitutive behavior of rock, including guidelines to achieve controlled failure
- Extracting engineering information from noisy geologic data
- Developing computationally-efficient algorithms for seismic imaging by full waveform tomography
