Events Calendar

Aerospace & Mechanical Engineering Seminar

Speaker: Birendra Jha, Assistant Professor/USC Viterbi School of Engineering

Talk Title: Coupled Flow and Geomechanics of Petroleum Reservoirs, Aquifers, and Faults

Abstract: Can we inject and produce fluids out of subsurface reservoirs without causing damaging earthquakes? Can we design and control hydraulic fracturing or "fracking" of rocks to maximize productivity but minimize risks? Will underground sequestration of CO2 lead to induced seismicity and eventually CO2 leakage along faults? Did Indian monsoon rainfall have something to do with the Nepal earthquake? These are some of the questions facing the petroleum industry, geothermal industry, environmental scientists, and the geoscience community-at-large. One way to approach these questions, and the approach that we follow, is physics-based modeling of the underlying processes of fluid flow, rock deformation, and faulting or fracturing. We specialize in computational modeling and simulation of continuum scale coupled flow, transport and geomechanical processes. We develop mathematically rigorous and computationally efficient numerical frameworks and conduct lab experiments to understand, forecast and eventually control these processes in nature. I will present some of the salient features of our computational framework that includes a finite element-finite volume method to solve the flow and deformation problems sequentially. Then I will show results from a few studies that attempt to answer the questions posed in the beginning.

Biography: Birendra Jha is an Assistant Professor of Petroleum Engineering in the Mork Family Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science at USC. He received his masters in Petroleum Engineering from Stanford University and PhD in Civil and Environmental Engineering from MIT. He has several years of experience in the petroleum industry in India and US. In the Geosystems Engineering and Multiphysics Lab (gemlab.usc.edu) at USC, Birendra's group conducts research in computational and experimental geomechanics funded by the Department of Energy and the Rose Hills Foundation.

Host: Department of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering

Location: Seaver Science Library (SSL) - 150

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Ashleen Knutsen