Jason Furtney was a student at the Institute in the early 2000s, after studying geology at Edinburgh University. Since then, he has been working as a consulting engineer for Itasca International, a geomechanics consulting and software company in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Today, Jason was back in Cambridge and gave a special seminar at the Institute. He discussed some of his recent work at Itasca, including work on solution mining of potash. Potash is a water-soluble rock made of potassium salts. It is economically important because it is often used as a fertiliser. In North America, potash is frequently solution-mined by circulating a flow of water which dissolves the salts in the rock. Jason and his team have developed a model of this dissolution.
The second part of the talk focussed on some of the engineering challenges associated with building and installing very large onshore wind turbines. Just like in the UK, onshore wind energy has been rapidly growing in the United States during the last few years. During construction of a new wind farm, very large mobile cranes are used to lift the nacelle and blades of the turbines. There have been several high profile cases of these large cranes tipping over and being destroyed during construction. Jason and his team have investigated the technical problem of soil bearing capacity failure, and used machine learning to make wind turbine installation faster, safer, and less expensive.
It was great to meet Jason, and hear about how he applied what he learnt at IEEF in his career. We look forward to welcoming him again in a few more years!