After working as a hydrogeologist for an Atlanta-based environmental consulting firm, Collin Sutton found himself questioning why there were no answers to some of the leading environmental cleanup problems. For the last few years, he’s been seeking to answer these very questions as a doctoral student at UW–Madison.
“My goal is to push the boundaries of what we know,” says Sutton, a third-year PhD candidate in the Department of Geoscience. “Somebody has to put in the research and the legwork to figure it out.”
Sutton hopes to create modeling approaches that industry leaders, academics and regulators can use quickly to make reliable predictions about the outcomes of incidents like oil spills and groundwater contamination.
Sutton only had the chance to explore these questions within the four walls of a campus laboratory. But a grant from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science Graduate Student Research Awards (SCGSR) program is set to change this.
“The Graduate Student Research program is a unique opportunity for graduate students to complete their PhD training with teams of world-class experts aiming to answer some of the most challenging problems in fundamental science,” said Harriet Kung, Acting Director of the DOE Office of Science, in a press release. “Gaining access to cutting edge tools for scientific discovery at DOE national laboratories will be instrumental in preparing the next generation of scientific leaders.”
Sutton will work with the Computational Earth Science Group at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico to expand on his research, which focuses on the fundamentals of how fluids flow and transport materials through fractured rock. The program begins Aug. 1 and lasts approximately four months.
“The timing of this allows me to move from the first step to the second step of my research,” Sutton says. “It’s a great opportunity to advance my research.”
How materials flow through porous mediums like soil and sandstone is widely understood. Fractured rock, however, remains a blind spot in many ways, according to Sutton.
“It’s a little bit more complicated,” Sutton says, underscoring that his research and lab work require techniques and practices not typically utilized in the field.
“Fracture network modeling right now is just really difficult,” he adds. “There’s not a lot of ways to do it. We have some tools and techniques, but they can take a really long time to run on computers.”
The Subsurface Hydrophysics Lab, led by Christopher Zahasky, an assistant professor in the Department of Geoscience, uses imaging techniques typically utilized in medical settings to describe different transport processes in fractured rock. Sutton highlighted the lab’s use of positron emission tomography (PET) scans used for cancer treatment and diagnosis.
“Our approach is to reduce the model physics,” he says. “We make it simpler, which allows it to be a lot faster.”
The lab has partnered with the UW Carbone Cancer Center to utilize PET scanners to see inside the rocks and how fluid moves within them. This technique allows for a full view of what is going on, Sutton says. At Los Alamos, Sutton plans to take this research a step further.
In the lab, the research team can only scan rocks about the size of the hand. At Los Alamos, Sutton will be able to learn the industry standard modeling approach for fracture networks, which he can then apply to larger formations in the lab at UW.
“We’re doing the lab scale,” he says. “But we need to go up to the field scale. This is what people actually care about and what has real-world applications.”
Through the program, Sutton will research at the site scale under the guidance of leading experts in fracture network modeling. He will learn from the scientists and their approaches, while sharing the work and data he has done at UW–Madison.
“I’ll learn how they do their work and try to combine my research and theirs together,” he says.
UW–Madison College of Engineering PhD student Seth Anderson was also selected for the DOE program. He will pursue his research at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California.