Vibration Monitoring and Suppression in Oil and Gas Piping Systems using a Novel Concept combining Shape Memory Alloy and Metamaterial inspired Structures
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Qatarâ s petrochemical processing plants have been in operation for several years now. These plants operate on an increased throughput and to meet with the ever increasing local and international demands. Piping systems are integral and ubiquitous components in both onshore and offshore oil and gas process industries. As a consequence of increased operational limits, these piping systems can become more susceptible to fatigue induced vibration failures. These include flow induced vibration, acoustic induced vibration and vortex induced vibration. These vibrations are detrimental to piping systems and their associated components. Piping failures result in disastrous economic and environmental consequences, as evidenced by several accidents that have occurred before. Typical corrective actions to minimize damaging vibration generally include adding pipe supports, bracings or using visco-elastic dampers. When practiced correctly, these methods produce immediate relief to excessive vibration but due to continuous changes in operational limit and aging infrastructure, do not provide a long-term solution. The main goal of the proposed research is to develop a novel approach that combines the use of Shape Memory Alloys (SMAs) and the concept of metamaterials, to establish an adaptive vibration absorption framework to suppress vibration induced fatigue failures onto existing piping systems in oil and gas industries. The proposed framework is inspired by the concept of metamaterials, and treats the piping system as a metastructure embedded with a series of local resonant systems mounted in critical places of the structure aiming to create â stopbandsâ wherein the propagation of mechanical waves are not permitted and vibrations are absorbed. SMAs will be utilized to serve as resonant systems due to their significant advantages in comparison to the commonly adopted solutions. That is because SMAs offer adaptive vibration absorption capabilities due to their controllable variable elastic stiffness as result of the solid state phase transformation and due to the dissipative nature of their intrinsic hysteretic behavior. Hence, depending on the eigen frequencies of the considered structure, the SMA resonators can be tuned accordingly to operate efficiently and additionally they can potentially adapt in changing conditions..........
