It gives me great pleasure to welcome Will Pettitt to the role of General Manager and Doug Stearley to the position of Financial Manager at Itasca Consulting Group, Inc. Their arrival is precipitated by the fact that John Markham, Itasca's longtime Executive Officer, will officially retire June 30 of this year. John's distinguished, stalwart record of service to this company is best illustrated by the fact that it has taken Will, Doug, and myself to replace him. He leaves a legacy we will all strive to live up to.

— Loren Lorig, Chief Executive Officer

Consulting

Software

International

Itasca Houston Adds New Engineer

Itasca would like to announce and welcome the addition of David Martinez to the Itasca Houston office. Mr. Martinez is a petroleum engineer with experience in rock mechanics applications to drilling and stimulation of oil reservoirs. He has experience in assessing in-situ geomechanical models based on the analysis of borehole-stability features, pore-pressure prediction and stress-field constraining. Other areas of expertise include stress-contrast determination, hydraulic fracture containment, borehole stability, fault sealing and stress path estimation due to injection/depletion of the reservoir. As Itasca continues to expand the geomechanics services it provides the petroleum industry, Mr. Martinez will be a valuable addition.

ARMA 2010

Matt Pierce of Itasca Consulting Group, Inc. (Minneapolis) will be giving an invited presenation at the ARMA Symposium (aka the 44th U.S. Rock Mechanics Symposium and the 5th U.S.-Canada Symposium) on Fracture Network Engineering. The conference is a technology exchange program, consistent with the ARMA mission to stimulate discussion and communication; the event will take place June 27-30, 2010, in Salt Lake City. In addition to Mr. Pierce's talk, Marisela Sanchez of Itasca Houston will be co-chairing a session on Induced Seismicity, and Neal Nagel of Itasca Houston will co-chair a session on Coupled Processes. Papers by Itascans Ivan Gil, Huanchun Hzu, Loren Lorig, Will Pettitt, and Juan Reyes-Montes have been included in the proceedings. And, lastly, Itasca co-founder Charles Fairhurst will provide a special presentation entitled "Looking Forward" on the first full day of presentations.

Training

The annual Itasca Software introductory training courses are complete. From mid-April to mid-May, 40 people received training on five Itasca codes. Demand for FLAC training in particular was so high that a second training course has been scheduled for the Fall. As with other courses, this is a first-come, first-served opportunity, so sign up now if you are interested. The dates for the course are :    October 13-15, 2010 Full course descriptions, registration, and price information are available online.

The participants of the FLAC3D training course with instructors Ed Dzik, Christine Detournay, and Reza Taghavi on the rooftop of Itasca Consulting Group's office building.

Conferences

Staff Publications

Han, Y, and Hart, R. “Seismic Analysis of the Reservoir-earth Dam-pore fluid System Using an Integrated Numerical Approach.” The fifth international conference on Recent Advances in Geotechnical Earthquake Engineering and Soil Dynamics and Symposium in honor of Professor I.M. Idriss, San Diego, CA. May 24-29, 2010.

Kwok, C.-Y., and M. D. Bolton. (2010) "DEM Simulations of Thermally Activated Creep in Soils," Géotechnique, 60(6), 425-433.

Sharma, R.-H., Konietzky, H., Kosugi, Ken’ichirou. (2010)"Numerical analysis of soil pipe effects on hillslope water dynamics," Acta Geotechnica, Springer, 5: 33-42.

Walter, K., Konietzky, H., Herbst, M. (2009) "Three dimensional discrete element modelling to investigate damage and fracture development at the grain size level," Proc. 2nd Int. Conf. on Computational Methods in Tunneling, Bochum, Aedificatio Publishers, Vol. 1: 215-222.