The end of week 2 is upon us. This week was very productive for me and I hope is continues to be like this. I was finally able to meet with my mentor and supervisor, Dr. Christopher Landry. He is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Texas at Austin in the Petroleum and Geosystems Engineering Department (PGE). There were a number of things that stuck out to me from our initial meeting, particularly his friendliness. In our meeting we discussed the paper that I was assigned to read as well as my general task going forward.
I immediately started working on my first task-creating a function that converts data from SynFrac to a 3D array. SynFrac is a program that outputs a synthetic fracture given input parameters. While the program visualizes the fracture in two dimensions, the raw data is of most interest. This task took me a few hours as I had to brush up my MATLAB skills after a 2 week long break. I quickly realized that what I learned in the MATLAB class I took in the previous semester was almost irrelevant. I had never considered the possibility of a 3D array existing and had to spend considerable time on the MathWorks website familiarizing myself with brand new syntax.
The concept of my classroom knowledge of MATLAB being almost useless was made even more apparent with my next assignment. I had never encountered any of the high power capabilities of MATLAB in my class. After playing around with a library of code that Dr. Landry had emailed me, I was tasked to create my first tool. This tool would be made using MATLAB's GUIDE, a functionality I did not know even existed. I had to use GUIDE to create a tool which would output 1D aperture (fracture height) data into a spreadsheet given various inputs such as the file containing the 3D array characterizing the fracture, flow direction, maximum aperture, vox resolution, etc. Once again I spent considerable time on the MathWorks forum, I even asked a question regarding global variables. It took hours of YouTube videos to construct & code the GUI for the tool. As I'm writing this, I'm not entirely sure if it works. I haven't gotten the chance to debug it and I already know I am going to encounter serious hurdles. Regardless, I learned quite a lot about MATLAB in the last few days, and no matter the challenge- I know I can overcome it.
This is just the beginning.
I immediately started working on my first task-creating a function that converts data from SynFrac to a 3D array. SynFrac is a program that outputs a synthetic fracture given input parameters. While the program visualizes the fracture in two dimensions, the raw data is of most interest. This task took me a few hours as I had to brush up my MATLAB skills after a 2 week long break. I quickly realized that what I learned in the MATLAB class I took in the previous semester was almost irrelevant. I had never considered the possibility of a 3D array existing and had to spend considerable time on the MathWorks website familiarizing myself with brand new syntax.
The concept of my classroom knowledge of MATLAB being almost useless was made even more apparent with my next assignment. I had never encountered any of the high power capabilities of MATLAB in my class. After playing around with a library of code that Dr. Landry had emailed me, I was tasked to create my first tool. This tool would be made using MATLAB's GUIDE, a functionality I did not know even existed. I had to use GUIDE to create a tool which would output 1D aperture (fracture height) data into a spreadsheet given various inputs such as the file containing the 3D array characterizing the fracture, flow direction, maximum aperture, vox resolution, etc. Once again I spent considerable time on the MathWorks forum, I even asked a question regarding global variables. It took hours of YouTube videos to construct & code the GUI for the tool. As I'm writing this, I'm not entirely sure if it works. I haven't gotten the chance to debug it and I already know I am going to encounter serious hurdles. Regardless, I learned quite a lot about MATLAB in the last few days, and no matter the challenge- I know I can overcome it.
This is just the beginning.