With the development of nonconventional oil and gas exploration, microscopic analysis of mineral distributions in shale receives much more attention in recent years. Meanwhile X-ray computerized tomography (CT) based on synchrotron radiation (SR), as a non-destructive technique, becomes an important tool and can be applied to the study of morphology, microstructure, transport properties and fracturing of shale. Traditional methods such as optical and scanning electron microscopy (SEM) are common tools for providing valuable information of microstructures; however, those surface observations are often inadequate in obtaining detailed 3D information of the sample, such as compositional distribution inside the shale. Moreover, samples of shale are usually damaged during serial sectioning. Therefore two scientific issues rose: one is how to generate high level reconstructed image data using SR-CT, another is how to use these CT image data to analyze compositional microstructures. The speaker and his research group study sparse regularization methods for reconstruction of image using SR-CT data. In addition, they study microstructure prediction with a volume of material on a simple cubic lattice, where each site, or voxel, represents a small region of space containing a mixture of compositions forming the material. Numerical experiments are performed to show feasibility of their algorithms.
About the speaker
Prof Yanfei Wang obtained his PhD from the Institute of Computational Mathematics and Scientific/Engineering Computing at Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) in 2002. In 2002 – 2004, he was a postdoctoral research fellow at University of Central Florida in US. He returned to China and joined the Institute of Remote Sensing Applications of CAS as an Associate Professor in 2004. In 2006, he moved to the Institute of Geology and Geophysics of CAS and is currently the Professor at the Division of Oil and Gas Resources of the Institute.
Prof Wang’s research focuses on inverse problems in geophysical prospecting including seismic, gravimetric, magnetic, electric, electromagnetic methods and non-conventional oil and gas exploration. He is the editor of six international journals, Eurasian Journal of Mathematical and Computer Applications, Journal of Inverse and Ill-posed Problems, International Journal on Geomathematics, Inverse Problems in Science and Engineering, Mathematical Reviews, and Frontiers in Mathematics of Computation and Data Science.
Prof Wang is a recipient of Science and Technology Award for young scientist of CAS in 2008, the Science and Technology Award for young scientist of Operational Research Society of China in 2008, and Fu Chengyi Science and Technology Award for young scientist of Chinese Geophysical Society in 2011 respectively. In 2013, he obtained National Natural Science Fund of China for Distinguished Young Scholars and was awarded the National Awards for Youth in Science and Technology. In 2016, he received the grant for Major Research Plan of the National Natural Science Foundation of China.
