Chiranth Hegde Wins Best Student Paper at AADE Conference
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April 27, 2016
UT PGE master’s student Chiranth Hegde won the Sandy Purdy Award at the 2016 American Association of Drilling Engineers (AADE) Fluids Technical Conference and Exhibition held April 12-13 in Houston at the Hilton North hotel.
The award, named after the founder of AADE, is given to the top student paper at the conference. This marks the first time a UT Austin student took home the award.
Chiranth Hegde
The conference, which attracts industry and academia experts from around the globe, covers improvements and innovations in drilling, completion, cementing and fracturing fluids. Hegde’s paper explores the use of machine learning to predict and optimize the rate of penetration during drilling.
“Drilling accounts for the majority of production costs in oil and gas, especially in this environment, so it is important to keep costs low,” says Hegde. “The machine I work with is learning models, which optimizes drilling by setting constraints on parameters such as RPM of the bit and weight on the bit. This concept can be applied in real-time ensuring drilling efficiency.”
In terms of next steps, Hedge plans to continue working on the implementation of machine learning and hopes to submit his paper to a couple of established journal publications.
