Research Areas

Currently there are two main active research groups within the School:

     The Fluids and Environmental Research Group

     The Materials and Structures Research Group

Research activities are concentrated within the following broad categories: 
 

• Fluids / Environmental Engineering
• Materials Technology
• Oil / Gas and Well Technologies
• Dynamics and Vibration

Current and recently completed research work by research students and staff includes: 

Fluids / Environmental Engineering 

Management of the Impact of Marine Discharges of Industrial Chemicals (MIMIC).

Boundary effects on waste water discharges.

Development of CFD algorithms for rotating non-newtonian drilling fluids.

Development of CFD algorithms for cuttings transport in rotating non-newtonian drilling fluids.

Heat transfer enhancement by swirl induction and extended surfaces. 

The School has recently been granted a major EU award to conduct research into the behaviour of tidal current electricity generating systems. The project "Opt-Current" is valued in excess of 750,000 ecu.

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Materials Technology

Hydrogen interactions in duplex stainless steel weldments. 

Aqueous hydrogen sulphide corrosion of iron, iron-chromium and iron-metal alloys.

Microbial corrosion mechanisms in high alloy steels. 

Oil / Gas and Well Technologies

Drag reduction with riblets in oil and gas pipelines.

Analysis and modelling of relative permeability data. 

Sand production and transport in horizontal and deviated wells.

Prediction and measurement of drilling and completion fluids  properties for application in high pressure and high temperature wells.

Development of optimum strategy for effective wellbore clean up in extended reach, multilateral and horizontal wells.

Flow capacity evaluation for the underbalanced drilling of a horizontal and multilateral well. 

Development of a knowledge based adviser system for effective sand control design and performance evaluation. 

Analysis of the effects of depressurisation on the influence performance of unconsolidated reservoirs.

Prediction of formation grain size from petrophysical data - Problem quantification and database development. 

Development of a downhole jetting tool for extended reach well (ERW) drilling. 

Virtual reality CBL tool for Well Technology. 

Study of Archie parameters for reservoir rocks at ambient and reservoir pressures. 

Computational modelling of borehole pressures changes during tripping operations. 

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Dynamics and Vibration 

Energy-based planned maintenance of offshore drilling mud pumps. 

Fluid-structural interaction effects on vibrations of pipework.

Active vibratory control of pipework. 

Research Facilities 

The School is equipped with extensive laboratory, workshop and computational modelling facilities. Experimental research programmes are accommodated within the Fluids, Materials, NDT, Welding and the Control and Instrumentation laboratories and a large mechanical / electrical workshop is also available, which houses several numerically controlled (NC) machines. 

TheSchool has recently introduced a large wave laboratory facility which will allow scale models of marine systems to be tested under realistic conditions. The school is also equipped with two large Computer laboratories, which house more than 100 networked PC's with Internet facilities. A suite of high-performance networked UNIX workstations is also available within the School, which are primarily utilised for the development/applications of mathematical modelling techniques, and for Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) and Finite Element (FE) analyses. 

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