Liangping Li
South Dakota School of Mines and Technology, SD·Earth & Environmental Science
Heat deep underground is a renewable energy source that could generate electricity. To tap it, engineers inject fluid into deep rock at high pressure to crack it open, a process called hydraulic fracturing.
- Fields
Earth & Environmental Science
Engineering
- Topics
enhanced geothermal systems
geothermal energy
hydraulic fracturing
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Sep 2027
What they work on
- Model how hydraulic fractures spread during stimulation of deep rock, using Idaho National Laboratory's network flow-discrete element model and experiments at the Sanford Underground Research Facility.
- Estimate geomechanical rock properties from pressure and temperature monitoring data using iterative normal-score ensemble smoothing, an inverse method the PI developed for non-bell-curve data such as fracture connectivity.
- Couple the fracture model with the inverse method to assess uncertainty in fracture growth caused by variations in rock type across a geothermal reservoir.
More about the research
Water then flows through the cracks and picks up heat. However, how these fractures grow is hard to predict because the processes inside the rock are difficult to observe and measure.
Why it matters
Better predictions of how fractures grow could make enhanced geothermal systems more efficient to design, which would help expand renewable electricity. The framework is meant to scale to other geothermal projects. The same tools could also inform related subsurface work such as carbon sequestration, deep borehole waste disposal and fracturing for oil recovery.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Collin Sutton
Colorado School of Mines, CO·Earth & Environmental Science
Develop a reduced-order, bipartite graph framework that captures the essential flow, solute transport and geochemical reactions in fractured rock without the cost of full-physics simulation.
George Bebis
University of Nevada-Reno, NV·Computer Science
Develop a physics-informed conditional generative deep learning framework that infers underground fracture network geometry and hydraulic properties from hydraulic and tracer tomography data.
David Harbor
Washington and Lee University, VA·Earth & Environmental Science
Run scaled flume experiments on fractured rock blocks to measure how rock mass properties and flow conditions together control when hydraulic plucking begins.
The school
South Dakota School of Mines and Technology: 1 labs on PI Pages, $24M a year on research, 12 research doctorates a year.
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