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We know how to do this,
and here corners were cut short and it bit them.
Bob Steffes knows about deepwater oil rigs and he knows about cement
and even though he doesn't yet know all the details about what happened in the gulf of
Mexico
this much seems likely
in the effort to save time and money
poor decision-making, not poor technology,
doomed the Deepwater Horizon.
as soon as I heard about the
the loss circulation problem and then another thing was that they circulated
drilling mud out of the top portion the pipe and put sea water in
that told me a lot
because they took a horrendous load off of here... A move that, combined with an ineffective
seal at the bottom of the pipe spelled disaster.
By taking mud out and putting sea water in,
that reduced the downforce by about a hundred eighty thousand pounds of load
which allowed mother nature to come on in.
Steffes ads that none of this would have mattered if the blowout preventor had not failed,
and learning more about why this one did will someday shed even more light on the disaster.
While Steffes studies the events leading up to the spill,
research is also being done on campus to assist and improve control and cleanup efforts
for future events that are affected by uncertainties such as weather patterns and oceanic flow.
Our goal is to first understand how the ocean currents
behaves,
naturally,
and and then take advantage, if possible,
to, for example, in the problem of
%uh chemical dispersant,
if I want to spray this chemical dispersant,
where should I be spraying this chemical dispersant, so as to have the maximum impact of it?
So then you start looking at this problem right away,
is to actually first
try to build a model for this system, so in a sense
try to get a model for the ocean currents. Assistant Professors Umesh Vaidya
of electrical and computer engineering and Baskar Ganapathasubramanian
of mechanical engineering are developing a software system
to provide a realistic model of the oceans currents
giving the user more control over the oil flow
by accounting for weather patterns, wind flow,
and the effect these uncertainties will have on the spill.
To give you an idea of the nature of complex diagrams that are involved,
imagine if I put a
%uh if there's an oil spill
at of one particular location at a given date,
the oil spill,
%uh the contaminate that is coming from this
might very well disperse in the ocean,
but if the same oil spill happened on some other day in the same location, the contaminates
can very well come to the shore.
in essence the software system will allow the user to make better decisions to contain
and clean up situations
before they become disastrous.