Annual Symposium: Accelerating Energy Transition through Modelling and Simulation

Gary W. Sams is an Engineering Fellow at SLB with over 4 decades in the oil and gas industry.  His expertise is principally in oil, gas, and produced water processing.  Gary is a registered professional engineer in the states of Oklahoma, Nevada, and Texas.  He currently supports SLB efforts for GHG reductions, low carbon technologies, and global sustainability in the Production System division. Gary has a Bachelor’s and a Master’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Tulsa.

Madhusuden Agrawal is Principal Engineer in bp where he is serving as a subject matter expert in application of CFD, and Multiphysics modelling to solve business problems across BP. Madhu has 25+ years’ industrial experience in analyzing fluid dynamics and related phenomena through numerical simulations and optimization for wide range of applications in energy eco‐system. He worked at ANSYS and Fluent for 20 years prior to joining BP. He specializes in multiphase and particulate flow modelling.  Madhu received his Masters’ degree in Mechanical Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, India in 1994. He is chair of CFD Study Group under Society of Petroleum Engineering Gulf Coast Section, and he has published 50+ journal and conference papers.

Hyunchul Jang is the CFD lead and a Principal Technical Advisor in Technip Energies, Houston. He has more than eleven years of experiences in the offshore industry and eighteen years of experiences in CFD analysis. Hyunchul holds a Ph.D. degree from the Department of Aerospace Engineering and Mechanics at the University of Minnesota in 2011. For the recent 5 years, he has focused on CFD analysis for accurately predicting global responses of offshore floating platforms and structural responses of marine risers and subsea pipelines in harsh environmental conditions. In addition, he has actively participated several joint industry projects to develop CFD practices for various offshore applications. Currently, he is applying his CFD specialties to floating offshore wind turbine applications.

Dr Georgios Deskos is computational scientist/engineer at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. He received his doctorate from Imperial College London in February of 2019. At the end of 2019, he joined NREL and started working on high-fidelity modeling for offshore wind energy, including large-eddy simulation of the marine atmospheric boundary layer, wind farm aerodynamics, ocean wave mechanics and wind-wave interactions. As part of his research, Georgios is one of the key developers of the Exawind software stack including the multiphase AMR-Wind solver. He is currently leading the development of an Exascale-ready, multi-physics, multi-scale, numerical solver for high-fidelity modeling of floating offshore wind turbines.

Prof. Mayank Tyagi is Chevron #3 designated associate professor at the Craft & Hawkins department of petroleum engineering, Louisiana State University (LSU). He also holds a joint faculty appointment at the Center for Computation & Technology (CCT), LSU since 2007. He obtained his Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from LSU and undergraduate in mechanical engineering from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kanpur. His current research interests span across physics-based simulations using high performance computing (HPC) and data analytics for interdisciplinary petroleum engineering applications such as image-based pore-scale modeling using lattice Boltzmann method (LBM), multiscale multiphase computational fluid dynamics (CFD), geothermal reservoir engineering, and unconventional reservoir simulations. He has also worked on the issues in the quantitative risk assessment (QRA) of offshore petroleum engineering operations and their impacts on regional economy. He has given numerous invited talks in India, China, and several US universities and published over sixty (60) peer-reviewed journal articles and conference papers.

Among many courses he has taught at LSU, data analytics and machine learning applications for petroleum engineering as a senior technical elective compliment the data visualization and computational methods courses. Since the beginning of 2020, he is serving as the Data Science and Petroleum Engineering Fellow at Enovate Upstream, Inc. At Enovate, digitalization technologies combine big data components with advanced artificial intelligence (AI) to offers exploration and production (E&P) companies to improve operational efficiencies as well as reservoir productivity across the entire value chain of upstream operations.

Dr. Anchal Jatale leads the North America Energy team for Ansys. He is championing the efforts in developing cutting-edge simulation solutions for new clean energy including wind, hydrogen and carbon capture. He has 1O+ years' experience in CFD modeling and simulations. For the past few years, he is spearheading Ansys Digital twin engagements in O&G and energy industry. His expertise is in reduced order modeling, system modeling, reacting flow, combustion, multi-phase flow. Prior to joining Ansys, he received his doctorate in Chemical Engineering from the University of Utah and bachelors in chemical Engineering from Indian institute of technology (IIT), Kanpur.

Dr. Alba is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Houston (UH) since 2015, specializing in Experimental and Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) research field. He received his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of British Columbia in Canada, followed by a brief R&D experience at SLB in Denmark studying multiphase processes. Dr. Alba has been collaborating with local industry in Houston on various research topics since joining UH. He has published over 50 peer-reviewed journal and conference papers and currently serves as Associate Editor of Engineering Applications of Computational Fluid Mechanics journal (Taylor & Francis Publishing Group).

Dr. Chochua is a Technical Advisor at SLB. Gocha has over 20 years of experience in the Oil and Gas, Turbomachinery, and Aerospace Industries, specializing in Computational Fluid Dynamics and heat transfer. Early on in his career, Gocha obtained his Ph.D. degree in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Florida. His research interests include CFD, simulation-driven design, erosion modeling and mitigation, turbomachinery, thermal management, multiphase flows, and machine learning. He has authored or co-authored 35 journal and conference publications and holds 30 patents and trade secrets.

Peters roles over almost 4 decades span across experimentation in the lab and field, develop/design and commissioning of new (reactor, heat transfer, (top, side, in-line, jet) mixing, separation, transport, energy, drilling, hydrogen) technologies, technical services to all Shell businesses, root cause analysis, emergency response, leading pace setting of (maintenance) shut-downs across the globe, and detailed modelling of technologies and processes.

As senior principal science expert, he explores and develops new pathways via collaborations in his vast network with other businesses, academia, institutes, national labs, and venture capital investment. He has a keen interest in the science aspects, developments of technologies and engineering solutions for clean / green production of performance products, as well as clean / renewable energy. Combinations and interfaces between disciplines has his specific attention, and ….… of course still linked with all aspects of fluid flow and reactor engineering, amongst others as technical authority. Serving in technical advisory boards and councils is another angle to help shape projects and (software) services. Currently he is member of the national science agenda review committee in The Netherlands, selecting new research proposals in all fields of the agenda.

A variety of the breakthrough approaches and innovations were recognized with European Key Innovator Awards, and disseminated via patents, conference presentations and journal papers.

Raj is a Principal Engineer at BP where he has been working since 2012. Prior to BP, he worked at ANSYS Inc. in various technical consulting/support roles. He obtained his Ph.D. degree in Mechanical Engineering from The University of Iowa in 2005. During his Ph.D. his work focused on developing an adaptively refined meshing strategy for simulating enclosed diffusion flames in normal and micro-gravity environments (with NASA) and analysis of proton-exchange membrane fuel cells (with Honda). At BP he has been working on oil processing applications with a focus on process safety, integrity, and efficiency. More recently, he is conducting analysis of low carbon technologies such as electrolysis, Fischer-Tropsch and electric vehicle battery thermal management systems.

Manjil Ray is a Research Scientist (III) in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Iowa State University (ISU). He graduated from ISU with a PhD. In Mechanical Engineering in 2020. His PhD. project titled “Eulerian models and kinetic theory closures for triboelectric charging in dense granular and gas-particle flows” concerned the modeling of electrostatic charging in industrial fluidized beds with the objective of understanding and mitigating wall fouling in polymer production. After graduating with his doctorate degree, he worked as a Postdoctoral Research Associate for projects sponsored by Pfizer and BP. At present, he is working with BioMADE for rational scaleup of fermentation in industrial bioreactors. He graduated with his Bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur in 2011, after which he worked with the Indian Space Research Organization in the Aerospace Mechanisms Group for a period of 3 years, before venturing into postgraduate education.

Tingwen Li, PhD, PE, is a staff scientist at SABIC’s Corporate Technology and Innovation (T&I) in Houston, Texas. His expertise is mainly in thermal-fluid and particulate multiphase flow modeling. Currently, Tingwen is a member of SABIC BLUEHEROTM team to support the automotive industry’s mission to create better, safer and more efficient electric vehicles (EVs). Tingwen has over 18 years of research experience in academia, government lab and industry. Before joining SABIC in 2018, he worked at US Department of Energy’s National Energy Technology Laboratory focusing on fossil energy technology development and applications. He has published more than 70 journal papers. He received his PhD in Mechanical Engineering from University of British Columbia, and MSc and BSc in Mechanics and Engineering Science from Peking University.

Dr. Xu is a research scientist at National Energy Technology Laboratory. He has been working on VV&UQ of MFiX and currently is focusing on multiscale modeling of multiphase flow to help the design and optimization of different chemical reactors for green energy related applications including coal, biomass, and plastic pyrolysis/gasification etc.

At present Dr. Rupesh Reddy is working as a Principal Simulation Scientist in NOV. He has 14 years of experience in cutting edge simulation analysis and design optimization in wide range of applications in areas such as multiphase flows, turbulence modeling, free-surface flows, FSI and fluid-particle flows. He has experience in application of simulation analysis to the design and optimization of the oil and gas equipment’s like Multiphase separators, BOP and Downhole tools. Recent years he is involved in developing Hybrid Digital Twins and Simulation methodologies related to Renewables.

Sebastian Chialvo is a Senior Consultant at Engineering Systems Inc. (ESi), where he serves as a subject matter expert in computational fluid dynamics and chemical engineering.  Prior to joining ESi, he spent eight years with ExxonMobil Research and Engineering in the Fluid Dynamics Group, including three years as group lead, during which he worked on projects spanning both plant support and novel process scale-up.  He has a Ph.D. in chemical engineering from Princeton University, where his thesis work focused on development of constitutive models for granular flows.

John Thomas is a partner at M-Star CFD. His interests include GPU-based computing, multi-physics modeling, process simulation, and fluid mixing process. He publishes actively within the field. Outside of M-Star CFD, he is a Research Professor at Johns Hopkins University, where he teaches courses in multiscale mathematical modeling and transport physics. He has MS/PhD degrees in Mechanical Engineering from Carnegie Mellon, a BS degree in the same field from Penn State, and an MBA from Georgetown.

Muhammad Sami is a Senior Principal Engineer at Ansys. He joined Ansys (Fluent) in 2001 after completing his PhD in Mechanical Engineering from Texas A&M University. He has worked across several industries helping customers with their simulation needs in the power, environment and energy sectors. His expertise is in the multiphase and reacting flows including electrochemistry and plasma modeling. Currently, he is leading the CCUS initiative at Ansys.

Daniel Lee is an owner and vice president of Convergent Science, Inc., Convergent Science GmbH, and Convergent Science India, LLP. He plays an integral role in revenue generation, marketing, distributor relations, and funded development for CONVERGE. Prior to joining Convergent Science, Dan spent seven years as a senior engineer at ANSYS/Fluent working in the design and analysis of aerospace and marine thermal/fluid systems. He specialized in the simulation of the two-phase turbulent reacting flows found in propulsion systems such as gas turbine engines and solid rocket motors.

Dan earned a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison Engine Research Center, where his research involved the development of advanced spray combustion algorithms along with LES modeling. Dan has M.S. and B.S. degrees from Texas A&M University, where he focused on combustion systems and thermodynamics.