Skip to content Skip to main navigation Report an accessibility issue

Alshibli and Jarrar Win Top ASTM Award

Professor Khalid Alshibli wearing a black suit jacket, white button up collared shirt and a red tie

Professor Khalid Alshibli

ASTM International is an independent organization that has been setting globally accepted safety and technology standards for more than 100 years.

Committee D18 on Soil and Rock (D18) develops ASTM’s standards relating to soil and rock, the materials that naturally mix with them, or the substances that are mixed with them for human use.

This year, Professor Khalid Alshibli and his coauthor, UT doctoral graduate Zaher Jarrar, will receive D18’s most prestigious technical recognition, the Hogentogler Award. This annual award, established in 1953, recognizes authors who publish technical papers of “outstanding merit.”

“It is a great honor and privilege to accept this prestigious international award,” Alshibli said. “We greatly appreciate the financial support we received from the ISSE Seed Grant, without which this research would not have been possible.”

Mixtures of materials in three phases (solid, water, and air) are important to many industrial processes, like gas and oil transport, energy storage, and water desalination. “Gas hydrates,” solid crystals of water-encased natural gas, are of particular interest because of their high energy density.

However, three-phase mixtures have been difficult to investigate because water and air appear very similar in traditional visualization techniques.

In their award-winning paper, “Four-Dimensional Dynamic Synchrotron Microcomputed Tomography Imaging of Gas-Water Interface at High Pressure and Low Temperature,” Alshibli and Jarrar described two new techniques for generating clear, three-dimensional images of the different components in such a mixture in a laboratory environment.

They also created a test cell that mimics the conditions at the bottom of the ocean, where gas hydrates form, making laboratory studies of gas hydrates much more accessible.

“We are excited that our published research is recognized as a transformative original contribution to the field of gas hydrates,” said Alshibli.

The award will be presented during the Main Meeting of Committee D18 on June 5, 2023, in Denver, Colorado.