News

05/09/2013: 2^nd annual group canoe trip on the Guadalupe river

The second annual Guadalupe river canoe trip was completed in high spirits despite low water and followed up with some pulled pork sandwiches, curly fries, and funnel cake in Luckenbach, TX (pop. 3). Click on the Gruppenphoto to enlarge it.

04/17/2013: Marc receives Distinguished Teaching Award from the Department

Marc received the G. Moses and Carolyn G. Knebel Distinguished Teaching Award for his new graduate class Essentials of Flow in Porous Media. The class was first taught in the Spring semester 2013 and aims to introduce students from the geosciences, engineering and applied mathematics to fundamental concepts of flow and transport in porous media. The award recognized excellence in graduate teaching and the awardee is selected by the graduate students in the Department of Geological Sciences.

02/27/2013: Ashwin wins GAIN 2013 competition

GAIN (Graduate and Industry Networking) is an annual event hosted by the Graduate Engineering Council at The University of Texas at Austin. It is both a broad Networking opportunity and an academically rigorous competition that allows The Cockrell School of Engineering to showcase its best and brightest graduate students.

02/02/2013: GPMG best represented research group
Jake Jordan wins early career poster award

Geological Porous Media Group comes out top the 2^nd Annual Jackson School Research Symposium. Jake Jordan won 2nd place in the ‘early career graduate’ category for his poster on reactive melt transport.

04/30/2012: Soheil Ghanbarzadeh wins Statoil doctoral fellowship:

Soheil won the Statoil graduate fellowship to study the pore network in rock salt. Due to the high solubility the shape of the pores is close to textural equilibrium, and therefore a minimal surface. The topology of the network is determined by the surface tension between different salt grains and between the salt and the brine.  As the surface energies change with temperature and pressure, the porenetwork may become connected and salt, which is usually considered impermeable, can become a major fluid pathway.

04/02/2012: Quinn Wenning wins Undergrad Best Poster Award:

Quinn Wenning won the Undergraduate Best Poster Award at the 1^st Annual Jackson School Research Symposium, for his project Characterizing Reactive Flow Paths in Fractured Cement with PhD student Nicolas Huerta.

12/18/2011: 100-th citation

Marc’s first PhD paper is cited 100 times. The work with Amir Riaz, at the time postdoc at Stanford, and my advisors Hamdi Tchelepi and Lynn Orr looks at the stability of a gravitationally unstable diffusive boundary layer. A theoretical analysis of the classic Elder problem in porous media convection.

Undergraduate research fellowship competition

Quinn Wenning won a $1000 a Spring 2012  Undergraduate Research Fellowship for his project on reactive flow on in cement fractures with PhD student Nicolas Huerta.

Cover art: Communications in Computational Physics

The cover of for volume 10, number 1 of Communications in Computational Physics features a simulation from our article Modelling magma dynamics with a mixed Fourier collocation – discontinuous Galerkin method co-authored with Dr. Alan Schiemenz (LMU Munich) and Prof. Jan Hesthaven (Brown).

The image, shown on the right, shows the localization of the melt flow due to reactive feedback in the top row and the orthopyroxene abundance in the mantle in the lower row.

Abraham Taicher receives NIMS Fellowship 2011-2012

PhD student Abraham Taicher has received the 2011-2012 National Initiative for Modeling and Simulations Fellowship from the CSEM graduate program.

15-16/08/11: Reactive Flow Summer School
by Peter Lichtner (LANL) and Glenn Hammond (PNNL)

This shortcourse will provide a hands-on introduction to PFLOTRAN, a massively parallel subsurface reactive flow and transport computer code that runs on labtops to high-end supercomputers. The code includes Richards equation for variably saturated media, two-phase CO₂-H₂O, and thermal-hydrologic-chemical (THC) modes coupled to reactive transport in multicomponent systems.

5/3/11: Austin Statesman features JSG Explore UT experiment

With great support from the Jackson School Marc Hesse and Kelly Quinney built a large version of the famous cornstarch & water experiment for Explore UT. The  experiment demonstrates shear thickening behavior and allows you to “walk on water”.  It was a big success and more than 500 children walked the walk.

Kyung-won wins AAPG – Allan & Eleanor Martini Grant

Kyung-won Chang received the grant to study buoyancy driven exchange flows at the BP-Institute. He developed a technique to quantify the exchange flow and is now using it to constrain leakage rates along permeable conduits and the role of hydro-mechanical dispersion in counter current flows.

12/8/10: GRL editor’s highlight:
Characterizing channels for transport of melt in mantle

To investigate how dunite channels would form and how melt would flow through them in an upwelling mantle, Liang et al. (2010) conducted numerical simulations. They found that interconnected dunite channels form the shallow part of the porous channels through which melt passes; deeper in the mantle, melt travels through channels composed of the rocks harzburgite and lherzolite. These results could help geologists interpret field measurements and improve models for mantle melt migration, shedding light on mantle dynamics and crust formation.

Liang, Y., A. Schiemenz, M. A. Hesse, E. M. Parmentier, and J. S. Hesthaven (2010), High-porosity channels for melt migration in the mantle: Top is the dunite and bottom is the harzburgite and lherzolite, Geophys. Res. Lett., 37, L15306, doi:10.1029/2010GL044162.