Ph.D. student Muhammad Akram Karimimi among Best Paper Award finalists

-By Valentina De Vincenti

CEMSE Ph.D. student Muhammad Akram Karimimi from the research team of Atif Shamim, Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering at KAUST and Director of IMPACT Laboratory (Integrated Microwaves Packaging Antennas & Circuits Technology), was one of the finalist in the Student Paper Competition at the International Microwave Symposium held in San Francisco, California, in May 2016.

Muhammad's article was among the few papers that were selected out of hundreds of submissions from all over the world and the only one representing KAUST and Saudi Arabia.

Beyond the selection of Muhammad's article at IM Symposium, his work on pipe conformable sensors for the oil industry is a major achievement for KAUST and the Kingdom. The project was funded by Saudi Aramco's EXPEC Advanced Research Center, an ARAMCO research branch aiming at increasing the discovery of oil resources and enhancing recovery in the major producing reservoirs.

With this paper, Muhammad Karimimi proposed the design for a zero-weight, extremely low-cost and full-range water-cut sensor that works irrespective of its orientation in an oil well. The new sensor is 100 times cheaper than similar sensors available in the market, and 1.000 times lighter. Karimimi has just built the prototype of this innovative sensor, and after some minor modifications, he will soon move into field testing.