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How can we design more efficient oil-processing facilities?

Efficiently designing oil-harvesting and processing facilities is key in the effort to reduce production costs – and the cost to the consumer. A greater understanding of how oil flows in various natural conditions, like oil-sand or oil-water flows, can lead to the optimized designing of pipes and other components critical to an efficient facility. AEM doctoral candidate Juan Padrino is researching some aspects of fundamental problems associated with these two-phase flows.
A doctoral candidate studying Fluid Mechanics under Daniel Joseph in the Department of Aerospace Engineering and Mechanics, Padrino came to the University of Minnesota from his home nation of Venezuela seeking a richer understanding of the mechanics he utilized in everyday research in Venezuela’s national oil company. 
“I contacted my current advisor, Professor Daniel Joseph, who had served as a consultant for my employer for various years and became one of his research assistants at the University of Minnesota while following doctorate studies in mechanics and aerospace engineering,” he recalls.
“In many cases, you have a pipe or a well with water and oil; gas and oil; or gas, oil, water, and sand,” Padrino explains, “It’s important for engineers who design and maintain processing facilities to be able to model and predict these flows.”
“It’s very hard and impractical to apply computational fluid dynamics packages to a big and complex system like an oil-processing facility,” Padrino says. “You may be able to simulate with great detail a separator or valve, but you cannot use CFD to simulate what happens from the well to the storing tank - you need to come up with engineering models that simplify things that are of secondary importance and model those phenomena that are important.”

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Last Modified: 2008-02-21 at 16:30:24 -- this is in International Standard Date and Time Notation