School of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Environmental Engineering Program and the Center for Environmental Sciences and Engineering
Invite you to join us for the
ENVIRONMENTAL ENGINEERING SPRING 2026
COLLOQUIUM SERIES
Friday, April 17, 2026 - 12:20 PM
CAST 212 / Teams (tinyurl.com/enve-seminar)
Integration of Experimental, Numerical, and Machine Learning Methods for Subsurface Energy and Environmental Systems
Dr. Cheng Chen Professor, Nariman Farvardin Endowed Chair Professor Department of Civil, Environmental, and Ocean Engineering Stevens Institute of Technology
Abstract: Production of oil and gas from low-permeability shale formations has changed the U.S. energy outlook, making the U.S. less dependent on foreign sources of energy. Proppant is a granular material used in hydraulic fracturing to maintain sufficient fracture productivity during energy recovery. Understanding proppant compaction, rearrangement, and embedment in a hydraulic fracture during reservoir pressure depletion is critical for effective production of hydrocarbons, especially in unconventional reservoirs. In our research, an experiment/simulation-integrated approach was developed to study the multiphysics processes that regulate the evolutions of fracture permeability and width resulting from granular material compaction and embedment in hydraulic fractures. Laboratory penetrometer experiments were conducted to obtain the load-embedment empirical correlation, which was then incorporated into a discrete element method (DEM)/lattice Boltzmann (LB) integrated numerical model to investigate the role of particle compaction and embedment on fracture conductivity. In a second project, we used the LB multiphase flow modeling to study two-phase flow and solute dispersion in the aqueous phase, which has direct applications to geological carbon sequestration and contaminant transport in the vadose zone. In addition, an indicator kriging method was developed to generate high-accuracy training data for a UNet++ machine learning model, which aims to segment digital images of geological materials in a consistent and efficient way and is thus a critical step before direct, pore-scale LB numerical modeling.
Bio: Dr. Cheng Chen is a Professor and the Nariman Farvardin Endowed Chair Professor in the Department of Civil, Environmental, and Ocean Engineering at Stevens Institute of Technology. Before joining Stevens in 2021, Dr. Chen was a tenured Associate Professor in the Department of Mining and Minerals Engineering at Virginia Tech. He is also holding a part-time faculty researcher position with DOE’s National Energy Technology Laboratory. Prior to joining Virginia Tech, Dr. Chen was a reservoir engineer and project leader in the rock mechanics group at Halliburton’s Houston Technology Center. Dr. Chen’s research is focused primarily on flow and transport in porous media and fractures, granular geomechanics, machine learning and data analytics, and the applications to subsurface energy, water, and environmental systems, such as groundwater flow, shale oil and gas recovery, geothermal energy, geologic carbon sequestration, geological disposal of high-level nuclear waste, and subsurface environmental remediation. Dr. Chen earned his bachelor degree from Tsinghua University, China, and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in civil and environmental engineering from Northwestern University.
For more information, contact: Dr. Zhi Li at 860 86 2450