Events Calendar

Multi-Disciplinary Technology Applications in the Energy Industry

Speaker: Dr. Fred Aminzadeh, Research Professor, Mork Family Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science

Talk Title: Multi-Disciplinary Technology Applications in the Energy Industry

Abstract: What are the significant technology advances in the energy industry in the past decade? What are current trends? What advanced computing technologies are continuing to have an impact on oil and gas exploration? How best we can use new signal processing and pattern recognition techniques to get the most out of the seismic data? Where do we want to be within the next ten years? What do we need to do to address challenges associated with declining oil fields and how the EE discipline can help? These questions will be addressed in conjunction with our most challenging exploration and field development problems. The need for cross disciplinary research and true integration will be discussed.

Some of the answers to the above questions may have a direct impact on the direction of the Reservoir Monitoring Consortium (RMC) being launched at USC. The RMC, with input from faulty from many departments, will look at the whole value chain in reservoir monitoring. It will focus on the data integration and data mining (eg 4D seismic, production data, passive seismic data), visualization and updating of reservoir model and real time reservoir management. It will also look into new techniques in soft computing signal and image processing to analyze and interpret the time lapse seismic and passive seismic data. Some of such applications will be demonstrated by a few recent real life examples, including a recently funded $2 million dollars DOE project for geothermal applications.

Biography: Fred Aminzadeh is a research professor at the Petroleum Engineering program at USC. Upon receiving his PhD in Control Theory in 1979 from USC, he went to Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, NJ. Subsequently he joined Unocal with both technical and management responsibilities. He also was an adjunct professor of Geosciences department at Rice University and held many position with different National Laboratories including LBNL, LANL, ORNL and LLNL. He has served as a member of DOE’s Unconventional Resources Technology Advisory Committee. He has three US patents and an extensive list of publications in diverse areas including 12 books such as those on Reservoir Characterization, Petroleum Geology of South Caspian Basin, 3-D Seismic Modeling Advances in Seismic Data Processing, Geophysics for Engineers, and Petroleum Industry Applications of Pattern Recognition and Soft Computing. Many of his books have been translated into Chinese. He is a Fellow of the IEEE and served as president of Society of Exploration Geophysicists in 2007-2008. Currently, he is serving as the Lead Guest Editor for the special issue of the IEEE Signal Processing Magazine on Geophysical Signal Processing.

Host: Dr. Alexander A. Sawchuk

More Info: http://ee.usc.edu/news/calendar.htm

Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) -

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Mayumi Thrasher

Event Link: http://ee.usc.edu/news/calendar.htm