A new $3 million research project at Texas A&M University at Qatar that will focus on liquefied natural gas (LNG) safety has been established thanks to an effort led by the Mary Kay O’Connor Process Safety Center, which is jointly operated by Texas A&M’s Artie McFerrin Department of Chemical Engineering and the Texas Engineering Experiment Station.

The project, which establishes a top-tier LNG safety research program in collaboration with Qatar Petroleum and the Qatar Foundation, is based on a similar program at the Brayton Fire Training Field at Texas A&M, which was established under the guidance of the Mary Kay O’ Connor Safety Process Center.

Center director and Regents Professor M. Sam Mannan is overseeing the development of the Qatar LNG initiative through which a team of postdoctoral researchers, graduate students and undergraduate students will work together, led by Simon Waldram, senior professor of chemical engineering, and Ahmed Abdel-Wahab, senior assistant professor of chemical engineering.

The Mary Kay O’Connor Process Safety Center will work closely with the new program, sending its graduate students and research staff to Qatar to participate in the research, Mannan said. In addition, staff and students from Texas A&M at Qatar will travel to the center in College Station to observe the set up of LNG tests at the Brayton Fire School.

“I am pleased that the years of LNG research collaborations with BP and the Mary Kay O’Connor Process Safety Center has helped lead to this project with Texas A&M at Qatar,” said Mannan, an internationally recognized expert on process safety and risk assessment and an authority of LNG research.

Recently, Mannan spearheaded a collaboration of more than 40 experts from industry, academia and various regulatory agencies in an effort to develop models that can help predict the behavior of the intense fires resulting from a potential LNG tanker spill. The group’s findings are detailed in a white paper that was made available to a variety of private entities and regulatory agencies and can be downloaded at http://psc.tamu.edu/links/lng-white-paper-on-pool-fire-modeling.

Increasing worldwide demand for energy, Mannan explained, has resulted in greater utilization of LNG, which is natural gas that has been cooled to the point that it condenses to a liquid. That process reduces its volume by about 600 times, making it more economical to transport. For a fire or hazardous situation to occur, LNG must be ignited after first vaporizing and mixing with air in the proper proportions. That conversion can happen very quickly once a spill occurs, Mannan said. Furthermore, LNG fires can behave differently than other fires, he added, emphasizing the importance increased research in the area.

The experimental part of the LNG research at Texas A&M at Qatar will be conducted at the new facilities of the Ras Laffan Emergency and Safety Training College. Plans call for the study of highly instrumented, large-scale LNG spills, with dispersion and fires conducted under carefully controlled conditions. Data from these experiments will be modeled and interpreted using Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) software.

“The research program, the first of its kind in Qatar, also aims to provide a new opportunity for home grown graduates educated at the Qatar Foundation and seeking to develop their talents further through research and innovation while at the same time contributing to the science of safety in Qatar’s global LNG industry,” said Brian Hunter, country manager for BP in Qatar.

Ryan Garica, ryan.garcia@chemail.tamu.edu

Popularity: 8% [?]

Both comments and pings are currently closed.