Dr. Ankit Srivastava, assistant professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Texas A&M University, was selected to receive the prestigious Doctoral New Investigator Grant from the American Chemical Society Petroleum Research Fund.
The grant provides start-up funds of $110,000 over two years for scientists and engineers within the first three years of their first academic appointment. Srivastava’s proposal combines the recent advances in material modeling and computational methods to improve the fundamental understating of microstructure, corrosive processes and crack growth resistance and pattern.
The energy transportation network of the United States consists of over 2.5 million miles of buried pipelines. Materials used in the pipelines degrade because of their constant and inevitable exposure to the environment. This degradation process, broadly called corrosion, involves many complex processes and affects all material types.
“The proposed work will lead to a computational framework that can be used as a tool to carry out ‘what if’ type studies for better lifetime prediction and designing material microstructures with improved properties and performance,” Srivastava said.
The Petroleum Research Fund was established in 1944 as a trust by seven major oil companies and was later re-established as the American Chemical Society Petroleum Research Fund. The society is charged with supporting advanced scientific education and fundamental research leading to further research directly impacting the petroleum field.