An Out of World Educational Experience

An Out of World

UW Department of Physics and Astronomy welcomes the public for annual open house.

Department of Physics and Astronomy Professor Chip Kobulnicky prepares the Wyoming Infrared Observatory 2.3-meter telescope for viewers before the annual WIRO open house. It was a chilly, clear October night at the top of Jelm Mountain, where the Wyoming Infrared Observatory rests — perfect conditions for the nearly 150 curious minds and enthusiastic stargazers to observe the night sky during the observatory’s annual open house.

Michael Brotherton and Chip Kobulnicky, both professors of physics and astronomy at the University of Wyoming, along with 15 volunteers led the public viewing.

Brotherton and Kobulnicky operated the Wyoming Infrared Observatory’s 2.3-meter telescope to give community members a glimpse of the night sky, from binary stars to star clusters and planetary nebulas.

“The WIRO Open House is often the largest public outreach event for the Department of Physics and Astronomy with the local Wyoming community,” says Brotherton. “This event serves as an opportunity to share with the public an explanation for what we’re doing in the strange building on the top of Jelm Mountain that many see and have questions about.”

The event attracted people young and old from across Wyoming for the chance to catch a glimpse of the immense, fascinating universe through a powerful telescope.

“The WIRO telescope is a big, impressive machine and it can be empowering to use it and a very visceral experience,” says Brotheron. “This event is an experience where people can feel connected directly to the universe beyond

An Out of World

Educational Experience

our own world that is not possible in any other way.”

The observatory is a unique resource to the area. It’s the only observatory in southern Wyoming and ranks as one of the premier infrared observatories in the world.

Brotherton says the observatory should be used to share science with the community as much as possible.

“Astronomy is one of the most accessible of the sciences,” says Brotherton. “It is literally just looking out into space to see what is there and how it relates to us on Earth. We’ve learned so many fundamental things about our universe through astronomy, like how old the universe is, how space is expanding, how far away the stars are and what they’re made of. It’s hard to overstate what these discoveries mean to our civilization.”

Educational fun was certainly the goal of the annual WIRO open house, as visitors not only experienced looking through the telescope, but also heard about the history of the observatory and infrared astronomy. They also learned how the telescope is controlled, and what science and research is conducted at WIRO.

“People ask why astronomy is important, and there are two answers,” says Kobulnicky. “First, understanding space and our sun can help protect Earth from things like impacting asteroids or solar storms. But secondly, it also shows us how vast and amazing the cosmos is, helping us to appreciate it in the way we might do with art or music or the rest of nature. Astronomy is the final frontier, as they say in ‘Star Trek.’ Understanding what is out there now might prepare us for voyages to other planets and other star systems in the far future.”

As the night went on, guests were able to look at the Cat’s Eye Nebula, as well as the globular star cluster M13 in the constellation Hercules. Being able to observe the night’s sky is one of the main ways people begin their obsessions with astronomy.

“A lot of school children are fascinated by space,” says Kobulnicky. “Astronomy serves as an engagement point for young people who we want to encourage into science and engineering careers. We want young people to see college and, hopefully, UW as part of their future.”

While the next public WIRO open house won’t be for another year, there are several other event opportunities the public can engage with until then. The public can visit the UW Planetarium’s website at www.uwyo.edu/physics/ planetarium to check out the weekly public shows and observatory nights, where the public can observe the night’s sky through the Department of Physics and Astronomy’s 16-inch STAR telescope on the roof of the Physical Sciences Building.

The department also takes telescopes to schools and community groups for evening viewing events. Groups can arrange a stargazing event by calling (307) 766-6150 or emailing physics@uwyo.edu.

“Wyoming is a great place for astronomy because the skies are dark and everyone can enjoy the night sky from their backyard,” says Kobulnicky.

Left: Department of Physics and Astronomy Assistant Professor Max Moe directs a visitor in viewing the M13 globular star cluster through the eyepiece of the Wyoming Infrared Observatory 2.3-meter telescope. Above: Undergraduate student Brock Parker (foreground) and graduate student Noah Cowper (background) perform liquid nitrogen demonstrations for the rapt audience of public attendees.

The University of Wyoming’s inaugural Saddle Up College Preparation Camp launched this fall 2022 semester. This required camp specifically for incoming first-year students introduced the style, pace and intensity of university coursework and prepared students to transition into university education. Throughout the week-long camp students were guided with plenty of opportunities to connect with faculty, staff and of course the students who will be part of their college journey over the next several years. Saddle Up was a partnership between the University of Wyoming Office of Academic Affairs and the Student Success and Graduation Hub. Learn more about Saddle Up at www.uwyo.edu/saddle-up/.

1400+ participating students 224 Engineering students

Developed a sense of community

UW Research Scientist Aids Hurricane Response in Dominican Republic

By Ron Podell

After Hurricane Fiona rocked the Dominican Republic, Ramesh Sivanpillai received the call.

On Sept. 20, the University of Wyoming senior research scientist in the Wyoming Geographic Information Science Center (WyGISC) was tapped by the International Charter Space and Major Disasters to be the project manager for its hurricane response efforts. The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) initiated the response and nominated Sivanpillai as the project manager.

Hurricane Fiona unleashed heavy rains in the Dominican Republic, which resulted in extreme flooding. More than 12,400 people were displaced; two communities were cut off due to the hurricane; and at least one death was reported due to a falling tree. Additionally, authorities closed ports, beaches and at least four international airports, according to various news reports.

“The International Charter allowed experts from various continents to come together for collecting, processing and delivering timesensitive satellite data and products,” says Sivanpillai, who conducted his work from the Laramie campus. “As the frequency of these disasters continues to increase, data and products provided by the International Charter will be crucial for response and recovery activities. It is very difficult for a country to set up the infrastructure and launch a sufficient number of satellites to replicate what can be accomplished through this international partnership.”

As project manager, Sivanpillai’s job was to evaluate the quality of the satellite images and oversee data collection and map production before sending the information to the end users and agencies in the Dominican Republic.

“We received satellite images from many space agencies. We acquired and analyzed satellite — pre- and postflood — images for identifying flooded areas and, in some cases, damages to infrastructure and buildings,” he says. “It was really encouraging to see the cooperation from so many countries to help out the Dominican Republic during this tough time.”

Sivanpillai says he received emails from the end user in the Dominican Republic’s National Emergency Commission saying that maps provided were “very useful for their planning and damage assessment activities.” The user also requested maps and products in Spanish so that response crews could disseminate and use the information widely.

“One of the challenges, while working in tropical regions, is the presence of clouds. This means many of the images we collect might not contain useful information,” Sivanpillai says. “However, radar images can penetrate the clouds and collect information about inundated areas. He (the user) requested more data and products from the radar satellites. Unfortunately, we have relatively fewer satellites that collect radar data in comparison to those that collect data in other regions of the electromagnetic spectrum.”

The Emergency Commission wrote to Sivanpillai that the cloud-free portions of images were extremely useful for damage assessment of structures and buildings.

Charter Origins

The International Charter Space and Major Disasters, formed in 1999 by the United Nations, consists of members from 17 charter countries and has responded to disasters in 154 countries, providing free satellite data from 270 contributing satellites for the impacted regions. To date, there have been 786 activations.

The organization is a worldwide collaboration, through which satellite data are made available for the benefit of disaster management. By combining Earth observation assets from different space agencies, the charter allows resources and expertise to be coordinated for rapid response to major disaster situations, thereby helping civil protection authorities and the international humanitarian community.

This unique initiative is able to mobilize agencies around the world and benefit from their know-how and their satellites through a single access point that operates 24 hours a day, seven days a week and at no cost to the user.

Sivanpillai says he likely received the call to lead because he has experience working on major disasters. In 2011, he was tapped by the charter to assist with major flooding along the Mississippi River that started in Illinois, an event that lasted roughly five months. Two years before that, Sivanpillai was selected by the USGS for project manager training in Denver. While a student at Texas A&M University in 1999, he volunteered to help with relief efforts in Nicaragua.

In 2018, Sivanpillai was again called by the charter to serve as a project manager for the Camp Fire that engulfed the town of Paradise, a community located in northern California.

“Hurricane Fiona in the Dominican Republic is my third activation, and the first one outside the U.S.,” he says of his active assignment that lasted through Oct. 9. Sivanpillai says he has two and a half weeks to submit his final report.

Since this activation in late September, the charter has been activated for providing data and products about Hurricane Fiona to Canada and the Turks and Caicos Islands; Typhoon Noru to the Philippines, Laos and Thailand; and flooding in Venezuela, Sivanpillai says.

For more about the charter activation response to Hurricane Fiona in the Dominican Republic, go to disasterscharter.org. For a list of countries involved and charter members, go to disasterscharter.org.

“It was really encouraging to see the cooperation from so many countries to help out the Dominican Republic during this tough

time.” — Ramesh Sivanpillai

UW’s Nguyen Receives Grant to Study Reliability of Clean Power Systems Through Machine Learning

By Ron Podell

Nga Nguyen, in the University of Wyoming’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, has received a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) grant of $503,459 for her project titled “Optimal Operation of Large-Scale Energy Storage Systems to Improve Reliability of Clean Power Systems Using Machine Learning.”

Despite providing environmental benefits, the rapid integration of renewable energy resources and EVs is expected to increase operational challenges for the grid. Nguyen hopes her research will be able to meet these operational challenges.

“To mitigate these negative impacts and take advantage of high renewable energy sources and EV penetration, energy storage systems can be used due to their fast response and high storage capacity,” says Nguyen, who is the principal investigator of the project. “However, given the current cost scenario of storage technologies, deployments of energy storage systems can be economically impracticable if not properly located and sized.”

Nguyen’s project proposes to create advanced operation and control strategies for energy storage systems with optimal siting, sizing and technology to maximize system reliability under stability constraints while facilitating higher integration of renewable energy resources and EVs.

“Due to the presence of many uncertain variables and diverse constraints, this project develops a deep neural network technique inside Monte-Carlo simulations to solve composite reliability to reduce the computational burden,” Nguyen says of the broad class of computational algorithms that rely on repeated random sampling to obtain numerical results. “The proposed research would have significant impacts on the operation of the modern power grid with the targets being multiple economic, technical, environmental and societal benefits.”

According to Nguyen, the benefits include: • Increasing public awareness of the requirement that renewable energy resources/EV-integrated energy systems must be sufficiently stable and resilient while enhancing environmental quality. • Fostering economic development by providing optimal operation and energy management. • Facilitating social equity by increasing electric production with high power quality to more customers. • Promoting a clean environment by advancing the integration of clean energy production via renewable energy resources and through the use of EVs. This would facilitate the reduction of the power grid’s dependence on fossil fuels.

The proposed framework also can potentially shape research in supporting the application of machine learning in power system reliability and can act as an initial step toward more early warning tools, operator decision support tools and better grid asset management, Nguyen says.

John Pierre, a professor, and Dongliang Duan, an associate professor — both in the UW Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science — are assisting Nguyen on the grant. The project also includes funding for three undergraduate students and two graduate students, she says.

Another notable impact of the grant will be the integration of educational and outreach activities to the state’s community colleges and K-12 students. The proposed project also will foster new collaborations between the principal investigators and researchers at Sandia National Laboratories, headquartered in Albuquerque, N.M.

Recipient of the 2022 Distinguished Alumni Award

Community Engagement

By Kaitlyn Polley

Joseph Leimkuhler’s introduction to the University of Wyoming was unique, and it was something that forever changed his life. After earning his undergraduate degree in geology and forestry from the University of Montana in 1981, he moved to Wyoming to work on drilling rigs as a mud engineer. There, Leimkuhler met Jack Evers, the former head of petroleum engineering at UW. Originally, Leimkuhler had planned to attend law school following his work on drilling rigs, but Evers had a different plan. Evers encouraged Leimkuhler to complete the engineering coursework needed for a master’s in engineering. In 1985, after completing the necessary undergraduate work, Leimkuhler, his wife Stephanie, and their two children moved to Laramie as Leimkuhler began working on his master’s in petroleum engineering.

Joining the UW community has been one of the most impactful decisions Leimkuhler has made, he says, and it has continued to serve him well over his career as an engineer. When he graduated with his master’s in 1987, Leimkuhler felt he had all of the skills and knowledge he needed to successfully run drilling rigs. With this skillset, he hit the ground running and started working for Shell in the Gulf of Mexico.

“We were drilling wells at 7,000 feet of water, which was the deepest in the world at the time,” Leimkuhler says. “I was always just thrilled to be doing what I was doing at the time because it was always unique, always a challenge. I managed to progress and eventually lead that organization. Sometimes you wake up and pinch yourself — how did I get here?”

Leimkuhler worked his way up through Shell to the position of offshore well delivery manager for the Americas before he left to join LLOG Exploration Co. in 2012. At LLOG, he served as vice president of drilling and helped grow the company into the largest private oil producer in the U.S. and the fourth largest offshore producer. Then, in 2019, Leimkuhler took on a new challenge of building Beacon Offshore Energy from the ground up as the chief operating officer. Currently, Beacon is based out of both Houston, Texas, and Covington, Louisiana, and operates six subsea fields and one drilling rig in the deep-water Gulf of Mexico.

Leimkuhler and his wife live in Mandeville, Louisiana, and while they are quite a distance from UW, they still keep the university near to their hearts. He recalls that some of his fondest memories at UW include walking with his young children to see basketball and football games and flying paper airplanes off the top deck of War Memorial Stadium when he was still a master’s student. As a way of giving back to UW, Leimkuhler serves on the Dean’s National Advisory Council for the UW College of Engineering and Physical Sciences and is the chair for the Petroleum Engineering Industry Advisory Board. Additionally, he and Stephanie support UW with their philanthropy through the Joseph and Stephanie Leimkuhler Petroleum Engineering Dean’s Excellence Fund. This fund is used to support undergraduate scholarships, graduate student stipends, undergraduate student enrichment experiences, and faculty awards to those who distinguish themselves in scholarly work, as well as other areas of UW. Leimkuhler has also been recognized for his work in petroleum engineering with the UW Eminent Engineer Award.

In addition to philanthropic giving, Leimkuhler enjoys speaking with engineering students at UW and believes strongly in supporting undergraduate education and research so students can make real-world contributions as soon as they graduate. He also recognizes the energy industry’s volatile nature but assures students that there are many opportunities for petroleum engineering. His biggest piece of advice for students is to bloom where you are planted, let your passion and curiosity carry you forward, and success will find you. Because of the impact the Leimkuhlers have had on the students and faculty of the UW College of Engineering and Physical Sciences, the Drilling Fluids Lab was renamed the Joseph and Stephanie Leimkuhler Drilling Fluids Lab in their honor.