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March 16, 2021
Topic:
Friction and Wear Issues in Conventional Energy Extraction Infrastructure
Speaker:
Philip Egberts, PhD, PEng
Associate Professor, Department of Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering, University of Calgary
Presentation Topic:
Conventional energy extraction represents a significant portion of the Albertian and Canadian economies. While often not a primary focus of the industry, there are several factors impacting the lifetimes of the infrastructure used in energy extraction. Often the focus on low-cost steels, the ease of manufacturing and other factors out-weigh the short lifetimes of the infrastructure. Recent efforts to modernize, increase the lifetime of the infrastructure and reduce overall costs have highlighted some systematic friction and wear issues that are impacting this sector. Focusing on hydraulic fracturing, the constant recycling of the water used in the process results in high salt concentrations in the fracturing fluid as well as the entrapment of hard, irregularly shaped debris in the fracturing fluid. The combination of the salinity and the particles in the water causes excessive corrosion issues for the steel pipes carrying the fluid to and from the fracturing site. There are several mitigation standards that can be implemented to improve the lifetimes of these pipes, including applying wear and corrosion resistant coatings to the inner walls of the steel pipes and/or injection of wear and corrosion inhibiting chemicals into the fluid to protect the infrastructure. In this talk, we will discuss how tribocorrosion (tribology + corrosion) can be used to find solutions to optimizing the performance of the systems. While this data only begins to tackle the larger issues relevant to the industry, it demonstrates a systematic approach that we have taken that can support the industry in reducing costs and environmental impact during energy harvesting.
Our speaker:
Philip Egberts obtained his Ph.D. from the McGill University in Montreal, Canada specializing in Experimental Condensed Matter Physics in 2011, while completing most of his research at the INM-Leibniz Institute for New Materials in Saarbrücken, Germany. Following his PhD studies, he joined the Carpick Research Group in the Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics department at the University of Pennsylvania as a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) of Canada Postdoctoral Fellow (PDF). He has been an Assistant Professor at the University of Calgary in the Department of Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering since September 2013, where his current focus is on the atomic and nanoscale investigation of adhesion, friction, and wear with the goal of making physical and predictive models of friction and wear. More recently, he has been expanding topics to include engineering tribology, to improve surface engineering for automotive applications and examine lubrication mechanisms for drilling in the oil and gas industry. In July 2015, he was appointed as Associate Head Graduate Studies in Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering and Associate Professor in
2018. From September 2019 until August 2020, he was a visiting professor and Humboldt Fellow at the University of Hamburg in the Department of Physics.
meeting details:
Location: STLE Alberta Section meetings will be held via Zoom webinar for the immediate future.
Cost for Presentation: FREE