Events

Seminar Title: “Pore-Scale Modeling for Micro- and Nanoparticle Transport”

Abstract:

Transport and retention of small particles in porous media occurs in a range of reservoir engineering applications such as fines migration, sand control, and novel nanoparticle injection technologies. Applications outside of the oil and gas industry include colloid transport in the environment, sterilization by microfiltration, and particle processing using microfluidics. In most of these applications, there are good reasons for us to be able to model if and how particles are retained, and to quantify how retention will affect permeability or other bulk properties of the porous media, and the interplay between particle properties, pore-structure, and microscale fluid dynamics makes them obvious applications for pore-scale modeling.

Modern algorithms and computational power mean that direct numerical simulation is a viable option for these simulations. Traditional pore-scale techniques such as network modeling also have a role, especially to take advantage of computational efficiency. This talk will focus on two different physical scenarios (damage caused by straining of microparticles and retention of non-straining nanonparticles), and use these scenarios to explore strengths and limitations of different pore-scale modeling techniques.

Biography:

Karsten E. Thompson is professor and Department Chair in the Craft & Hawkins Department of Petroleum Engineering. He holds the Longwell-Leonard Distinguished Professorship and the Malcolm C., Jr. and Gene Perdue Lowe Professorship.

Dr. Thompson’s research interests are in computational modeling of transport in porous media, with particular interests in image-based modeling and multiscale modeling of processes relevant to oil and gas production. He teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in the areas of fluid mechanics, computational modeling, heat and mass transfer, flow in porous media, and reservoir dynamics.

Dr. Thompson has been at LSU for 20 years, originally joining the Department of Chemical Engineering as an assistant professor.  He was professor of chemical engineering prior to moving to petroleum engineering as department chair in 2011. He has a B.S. degree from the University of Colorado and M.S.E. and PhD degrees from the University of Michigan, all in chemical engineering.