The Department of Mathematics at the University of Wyoming will purchase computer equipment which will be dedicated to the support of research in the mathematical sciences. The equipment will be used for several research projects, including in particular: the numerical simulation of three-phase porous-media flows, the investigation of the the scale-up problem for such flows, the development of particle tracking schemes for nonlinear conservation laws and of parallel adaptive multi-scale finite element methods that can be applied to them. The projects aim at advancing the state-of-the-art in modeling and simulation of fluid flow in porous media such as oil reservoirs and aquifers. They will explore new computational algorithms, both for sequential and parallel computers, the incorporation of complex fluid physics, and eventually will apply these methods to the study of enhanced oil recovery techniques which are already used in the state of Wyoming as well as elsewhere in the United States. Thus, the projects will have a large social impact on the state of Wyoming, due to its concentration of natural resources in gas, coal and oil reservoirs, and ultimately on the U.S. maintaining its leadership role in applied computational science in a field of high importance to today's world economy. On a different scale, the projects span several disciplines and are tuned to the University of Wyoming mission of interdisciplinary computational science in its academic plan. Existing research links between the Departments of Mathematics, Statistics, Chemical and Petroleum Engineering, Chemistry, Computer Science, as well as the Institute for Enhanced Oil Recovery and the School for Energy Resources will be stimulated, and will result in attracting additional students in the existing programs. The project is coupled tightly with an on-going education plan aimed at developing both an undergraduate and a graduate curriculum in Computational Science, to be offered through some of the above departments above as a minor. This minor has already been approved at the College of Arts level for the Mathematics Department where the emphasis will be on training students in high-performance computing and its use in the study of complex physics, with first undergraduate students expected this Fall. Other departments and the graduate program are expected to follow gradually over the next couple of years.
