Can Car Crash Modelling Technology Predict Offshore Drilling Disasters?

Aug. 26, 2011 - PRLog -- It’s the billion dollar question for all offshore drilling giants: could the Deepwater Horizon disaster have been avoided somehow?

Researchers at the MIT’s Impact and Crashworthiness Laboratory may have just discovered a partial answer.  The introduction of the same computer modelling system that can predict whether car components can hold their own in a crash, could now also forecast whether pipes might fracture at offshore drilling sites. A fractured pipe can mean the difference between a stable operation and an enormous oil spill.

The MIT researchers’ method combines computer simulations with physical experiments for forecasting. In the automobile industry, this translates to cutting out samples from a commonly used material such as steel, spraying it with sample dots, fastening the cutout into a machine and bombarding it with alternative kinds of structural loads. A camera takes pictures of the material as it bears the impact, and sends the images to a computer which promptly maps the dots along a grid in order to pinpoint where and when deformations show up.

A similar method, of testing a variety of sizes and shapes of materials under varying degrees of pressure, could also work in conjunction with deep water drilling pipes. As drilling pipes are also consistently subjected to intense pressure.

The researchers tested this theory by simulating the conditions of last year’s Deepwater Horizon disaster with a computer model of the drill riser (http://www.claxtonengineering.com/Products/Drilling-Riser...) itself. From this they reconstructed the entire accident which resulted in a model that could predict both the location and types of cracks which actually caused the spill to begin with.

In the future, companies in the oil industry (http://www.claxtonengineering.com/) like Claxton could use the MIT’s research in order to select more flexible piping materials that won’t break under the severe pressure. Whilst the technology cannot prevent possible future oil disasters entirely, when used in combination with other safeguards (for example, offshore oil rig sensors) this could at least act as a partial block against the potential for offshore drilling accidents.

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