Summer School on Flow in Porous Media with Emphasis on Modeling Oil Reservoirs

University Of Wyoming, Laramie WY

Investigators

Abstract

The Department of Mathematics of the University of Wyoming will be hosting a Summer Conference on Flow in Porous Media with Emphasison Modeling Oil Reservoirs. This Summer School will be the 2007 edition ofthe Rocky Mathematical Consortium summer conferences that have been going onfor twenty five years. The conference is scheduled to last 12 days, from Monday June 18, 2007 to Friday June 29, 2007. Lectures will only take place during weekdays. Each day of the meeting will begin with two 75-minutes lecturesby the main lecturers. It is planned to have two main lecturers per week. Each afternoon will also include 1-2 hours of talks and presentations from additional regional speakers and from the participants. The objective of the summer school is to educate graduate students and facultyabout the most recent developments in oil reservoir modeling, multiphase flowthrough porous media and the numerical and computational methods used in the simulations. There will also be talks about multiphase problems in hydrology.The summer school will provide participants acutting-edge survey of multiphase modeling. Topics to be covered include: Physicaland chemical structure of porous media, multiphase flow in porous media, numericalmethods and stochastic modeling of porous media. The four main lecturers will be:Zhangxin Chen (Southern Methodist University), Martin Diaz (Instituto Mexicanodel Petroleo), Malgorzata Peszynska (Oregon State University) and Mohammad Piri (University of Wyoming). There will be additional speakers who will give one ortwo-hour presentations. The impact of the program and further goals are to enhancethe general population understanding of the important role that mathematics playsin their lives through the study of a vital application, and to help middle school andhigh school teachers develop lessons for their classrooms. This will help students beginto understand and enjoy some of the basic mathematical and computational issues that arise in multiphase flow through porous media. There will be two conferencesfor a general audience and some participants and speakers will interact with highschool students and teachers who will be on campus for other programs, speciallyteachers getting a masters degree by taking summer courses. These teachers will getideas on how to make mathematics and science more pertinent and exciting to theirstudents. Participants will get an invaluable education in a research area of national relevance.