My name is Hariharan Ramachandran. I am a postdoc working in the seepage reconstruction task as part of the Project Seamstress. My major focus is to perform fluid flow simulations during methane venting at the Vestnesa Ridge. Specifically, the interdependence between the hydrate phase behavior and hydraulic fracturing during seepage. This task is performed in collaboration with Dr. Hugh Daigle, Associate Professor at the Petroleum and Geosystems Engineering, The University of Texas at Austin. I recently returned from 6-week trip in Texas. I focused on learning PFLOTRAN during my Austin stay as part of our collaboration. PFLOTRAN is a fully open-source subsurface flow and transport code with parallel computational capability. The capability to perform gas hydrate simulations was recently added to this model. This provides us an opportunity to investigate the seepage problem in 3D, which is particularly exciting. I spent my time learning how to setup a basic hydrate simulation problem and learning to use ParaView (open-source visualization software) to visualize results (Fig 1). On the other side, I got an opportunity to revisit my alma mater, meet old friends, and relax at my favorite haunts in Austin. After completing a 5-week stay at Austin, I visited Galveston, Houston to attend the natural gas hydrates systems section of Gordon Research Seminar. I presented (~15mins talk) about the Project Seamstress and the seepage-modeling task to the gas hydrates community.
Fig 1: Example workspace. The window on the left shows a typical pflotran input file in VS CODE editor. The window on the right shows the output visualization in ParaView.
By Hariharan Ramachandran