Research

Microbial Enhanced Oil Recovery (MEOR) 

Utilization of microbial activities can improve oil recovery. We explore bacterial activities at oil-water-rock interfaces and attempt to develop a novel technique to enhance oil recovery.

Selective plugging using bacterial biopolymers and improvement of oil mobility using bio-surfactant are explored, and its seismic monitoring and evaluation using PNM (pore network modeling) are conducted.


 
Measurement of Thermal Properties of Soils and Rocks

This research is to develop a method to measure thermal properties of soils and rocks; and to investigate relationships between thermal properties and engineering properties of soils and rocks.







Development of Urban debris flow barriers 


With climate change due to global warming, recently, landslides caused by extreme rainfall occur frequently and the scale of damage is becoming increasingly larger. This research is to develop barriers for preventing debris flow which is layered system with minimizing disturbance of the ecosystem.






Enhanced Coalbed Methane (ECBM) 
ECBM is a technology to induce enhanced methane recovery while Carbon dioxide (CO2) injection is operating and the CO2 injected to coal seams is adsorbed onto the coal seams. Our research is to investigate the effects of CO2 adsorption on permeability and stiffness of coals.





Ultrasonic P-wave Reflection Monitoring of Soil Erosion
 
 
In EFA, there is no monitoring technique for estimation of soil erosion other than naked eye observation which can cause huge measurement error. To overcome these factors, We investigated the feasibility of adopting the P-wave reflection system for monitoring of soil erosion.