Description:

Dr. Sibani Lisa Biswal from Rice University will presenta  seminar on Squishy Bubble Dynamics for Oil Recovery Applications.

Abstract:
The use of foam in enhanced oil recovery (EOR) applications is being considered for gas mobility control to ensure pore-trapped oil can be effectively displaced. In fractured reservoirs, gas tends to channel only through the highly permeability regions, bypassing the less permeable porous matrix, where most of the residual oil remains. Because of the unique transport problems presented by the large permeability contrast between fractures and adjacent porous media, we aim to understand the mechanism by which foam transitions from the fracture to the matrix and how initially trapped oil can be displaced and ultimately recovered. My lab has generated micromodels, which are combined with high-speed imaging to visualize foam transport in models with permeability contrasts, fractures, and multiple phases. The wettability of these surfaces can be altered to mimic the heterogeneous wettability found in reservoir systems. We have shown how foam quality can be modulated by adjusting the ratio of gas flow ratio to aqueous flow rate in a flow focusing system and this foam quality influences sweep efficiency in heterogeneous porous media systems. I will discuss how this understanding has allowed us to design better foam EOR processes.

Biography:
Dr. Sibani Lisa Biswal is an Associate Professor at the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at Rice University in Houston, TX and leads the Soft Matter Engineering Laboratory. Dr. Biswal’s research focuses on the directed assembly of colloidal systems with magnetic fields, nanomaterials for lithium ion batteries, and the understanding and manipulation of microscale fluids for oil processes. She has a B.S in chemical engineering from Caltech (1999) and a Ph.D. in chemical engineering from Stanford University (2004). She is the recipient of an ONR Young Investigator Award (2008), a National Science Foundation CAREER award (2009), Rice U. Graduate Student Association Faculty Teaching and Mentoring Award (2012), and the Southwest Texas Section AICHE Best Fundamental Paper Award (2014).

Date & Time: Thursday, January 15th, 9:00 am -10:00 am
Location: ITW (1350) Room- Ford Motor Company Engineering Design Center
2133 Sheridan Road (located next to Tech)

*Refreshments will be available at 8:45 am)

Description:

Dr. Kumar Agrawal from Rice MIT will present a seminar on Engineering 2-D Membranes with Selective Pores.

Abstract:
Two-dimensional (2-D) porous materials are highly desirable building blocks for fabrication of membranes. The short transport path in the 2-d membranes has been shown to yield orders of magnitude higher throughput than the current state-of-the-art membranes, and therefore, the 2-d membranes will be highly energy-efficient. This is especially relevant because separations account for 40% of the total energy consumption in the chemical industry. However, the realization of these 2-d membranes with size-selective pores faces synthesis and engineering challenges, due to which, high-throughput, size-selective, and stable 2-d membranes have been elusive.

Biography:
Dr. Kumar Agrawal is a postdoctoral associate in the department of Chemical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). In his postdoctoral research at MIT, Dr. Agrawal is learning new techniques to synthesize and functionalize 2-d films of graphene and MoS2, which he plans to use for catalysis. Dr. Agrawal received his doctoral degree in Chemical Engineering at the University of Minnesota, while serving as a teaching assistant for undergraduate and graduate level courses. His research interests include pushing the frontiers of 2-d membranes, while simultaneously developing material platforms that will be beneficial to the multidisciplinary field of science and engineering.

Date & Time: Thursday, January 15th, 9:00 am -10:00 am
Location: Abbott Auditorium, Pancoe Pavillion

*Refreshments will be available at 8:45 am

Description:

Cells have an amazing ability to process information, make decisions, and change their state in response to changing environments – all behaviors that bioengineers and synthetic biologists are trying to harness for a broad array of applications in health and sustainability. These behaviors are encoded in the DNA genome of the cell as genetic ‘programs’ that use the basic chemical processes of gene expression to synthesize cellular RNAs and proteins in specific patterns that determine cellular function. Thus our ability to control cellular behavior is directly connected to our ability to control and engineer gene expression, making this a central goal of bioengineering and synthetic biology.

Dr. Julius Lucks is Assistant Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at Cornell University. After graduating with a BS in Chemistry, he spent a summer working with Robert Parr before obtaining an M. Phil. in Theoretical Chemistry at Cambridge University as a Churchill Scholar. As a Hertz Fellow at Harvard University, he researched problems in theoretical biophysics including RNA folding and translocation, viral capsid structure and viral genome organization. As a Miller Fellow at UC Berkeley in the laboratory of Adam P. Arkin, he engineered versatile RNA-sensing transcriptional regulators that can be easily reconfigured to independently regulate multiple genes, logically control gene expression, and propagate signals as RNA molecules in gene networks. He also lead the team that developed SHAPE-Seq, an experimental technique that utilizes next generation sequencing for probing RNA secondary and tertiary structures of hundreds of RNAs in a single experiment. Professor Lucks’ research combines both experiment and theory to ask fundamental questions about the design principles that govern how RNAs fold and function in living organisms, and how these principles can be used to engineer biomolecular systems, and open doors to new medical therapeutics.

Date & Time: Thursday, March 5th, 9:00 am -10:00 am
Location: Abbott Auditorium, Panco Pavillion

*Refreshments will be available at 8:45 am)

Description:

With the worldwide demand for energy and thermal management rapidly accelerating, significant focus is being provided to new environmentally clean energy resources such as solar energy on one hand while thermoelectric devices, which can convert thermal energy to electrical energy (and vice-versa), are also receiving increasing attention for power generation, waste heat recovery and solid-state cooling. For both approaches, strategies are underway to identify materials and device architectures that are inexpensive and scalable for widespread use yet efficient compared to existing technologies. The advent of nanotechnology enables novel approaches to energy conversion that may provide both higher efficiencies and simpler manufacturing methods. However, for this goal, since devices typically involve electrical conduction through films of nanomaterials, understanding and improving charge transport in these films can immediately lead to better device performance. While doping provides a general design paradigm for controlling the electronic conductivity of bulk semiconductors, there exists no analogous strategy for homogeneous, precise doping of colloidal semiconductor nanomaterials that affects their electronic properties. Here we will discuss the challenges in this area as well as recent progress. In particular, we will describe approaches to dope semiconductor nanomaterials with a controllable amount of electronic impurities. The physical characterization of these materials shows that the addition of even a few impurity atoms has a dramatic effect on their optical and thermoelectric properties. Thus, these experiments begin to reveal the properties of a new class of nanomaterials that may be important for future nano-devices.

Dr. Ayaskanta Sahu is a Materials Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Molecular Foundry, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California. His research focuses on investigating new classes of nanostructured hybrid materials that have promise for optoelectronic and thermoelectric energy conversion. He is particularly interested in understanding the underlying physics behind their unique size and interface dependent behavior, with an aim to manipulate their size, structure, composition and doping, and gain control over their properties and finally use this knowledge to design and synthesize novel hybrid materials with targeted properties. He has a B.Tech. in Chemical Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee (2007) and a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from University of Minnesota (2012). He spent a couple of years (2011-2013) at ETH Zurich as a visiting scientist before joining the Materials Science Division at LBNL in 2013.

Date & Time: Thursday, March 12th, 9:00 am -10:00 am
Location: Abbott Auditorium, Pancoe Pavillion

*Refreshments will be available at 8:45 am)