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SUNMONTUEWEDTHUFRISAT
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Events for September
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Lyman Handy Colloquium Series:
Thu, Sep 13, 2007 @ 12:30 PM - 01:50 PM
Mork Family Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Steven Bryant, UT Austin
http://www.ices.utexas.edu/~sbryant/Old Dogs and New Tricks:
Will Biotechnology Actually Revolutionize the Oil Industry This Time Around?The idea of using microbes to increase recovery from oil reservoirs is more than fifty years old. Proponents of microbial enhanced oil recovery (MEOR) have long championed its advantages, but field applications have never lived up to the promise implied by those claims. In the current era of sustained high oil prices and increasing demand for hydrocarbons, operators have renewed their interest in all forms of EOR. Meanwhile, techniques for genomic engineering, metabolic engineering and biotechnology in general have developed rapidly. Can the potential of MEOR – in essence, the possibility of implementing EOR for the same price as a waterflood – be realized this time around?To answer that question, it is instructive to review the reasons for the failure of MEOR in the past. An important lesson from that review is that a multidisciplinary perspective is absolutely necessary for this application. We then consider an example of MEOR that works and has yielded an economic success in the field. Here the lesson is a common one in engineering: simpler processes are more robust. However, efforts to establish a mechanistic understanding of the successful process raise more questions than they answer. These questions turn out to relate to a much broader theme: how life forms have managed to adapt to an extraordinary range of conditions on this planet. Recognizing these issues provides insight into what is feasible and what is improbable for oilfield applications of biotechnology.Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - 122
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Petra Pearce
This event is open to all eligible individuals. USC Viterbi operates all of its activities consistent with the University's Notice of Non-Discrimination. Eligibility is not determined based on race, sex, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or any other prohibited factor. -
Dynamical Order and Complexity in Rhythmic Chemical Systems
Thu, Sep 27, 2007 @ 12:45 PM
Mork Family Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
John L. Hudson
Chemical Engineering
University of Virginia
Charlottesville, Virginia, USA The interaction and synchronization of populations of rhythmic processes is important in a variety of fields ranging including chemistry (influence on overall rate of reaction), biology (circadian rhythm of suprachiasmatic nuclei, essential tremors), and engineering (lasers and microwave systems). A feature of such systems is that the overall, or collective, behavior can be significantly different from the dynamics of the individual components. We introduce the subject of complexity and order with a brief discussion of two examples: the sudden transition to pitting corrosion through the cooperative behavior of metastable pits and patterns of synchrony associated with epileptic seizures.
The focus of the presentation is then on experiments with arrays of electrochemical oscillators. The experiments serve as a platform with which the effects of coupling, external forcing, and feedback can be studied since rates of reaction on each electrode can be obtained and elements of the array are individually addressable. Even very weak coupling among sites can produce significant changes in the collective behavior of the system including a phase transition at a critical coupling point at which the onset of synchronization occurs. We show that mutual entrainment in interacting oscillators can be characterized using phase models developed from direct experiments with a single oscillator and sets of oscillators. We show how such phase models can be used to describe and tune complex dynamic structures to desired states; weak, non-destructive signals are employed to alter interactions among nonlinear rhythmic elements. Application is made to the generation of sequentially-visited dynamic cluster patterns similar to reproducible sequences seen in biological systems and to the design of a nonlinear anti-pacemaker for the destruction of pathological synchronization of a population of interacting oscillators.Selected publications: Kiss, Zhai, Hudson, Science 296, 1676 (2002)
Kiss and Hudson, AIChEJ 49, 2234 (2003).
Mikhailov, Zanette, Zhai, Kiss, Hudson, PNAS 101 (30), 10890 (2004).
Punckt, Bölscher,Rotermund,Mikhailov,Organ,Budiansky,Scully, and Hudson, Science 305, 1133 (2004).
Kiss, Rusin, Kori, and Hudson, Science 316, 1886 (2007).Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - 122
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Petra Pearce Sapir
This event is open to all eligible individuals. USC Viterbi operates all of its activities consistent with the University's Notice of Non-Discrimination. Eligibility is not determined based on race, sex, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or any other prohibited factor.
