Shape memory alloy actuated accumulator for ultra-deepwater oil and gas exploration

Abstract

As offshore oil and gas exploration moves further offshore and into deeper waters to reach hydrocarbon reserves, it is becoming essential for the industry to develop more reliable and efficient hydraulic accumulators to supply pressured hydraulic fluid for various control and actuation operations, such as closing rams of blowout preventers and controlling subsea valves on the seafloor. By utilizing the shape memory effect property of nitinol, which is a type of shape memory alloy (SMA), an innovative SMA actuated hydraulic accumulator prototype has been developed and successfully tested at Smart Materials and Structure Laboratory at the University of Houston. Absence of gas in the developed SMA accumulator prototype makes it immune to hydrostatic head loss caused by water depth and thus reduces the number of accumulators required in deep water operations. Experiments with a feedback control have demonstrated that the proposed SMA actuated accumulator can provide precisely regulated pressurized fluids. Furthermore the potential use of ultracapacitors along with an embedded system to control the electric power supplied to SMA allows this accumulator to be an autonomous device for deployment. The developed SMA accumulator will make deepwater oil extraction systems more compact and cost effective.

On the replacement of steel by NITINOL as coupling agent in automobile shaft

“…SMAs are now used as actuators, controllers, vibration isolators, sensors, dampers, and structural connectors. SMA of NiTi is commonly implemented in oil and gas industries for piping networks (Patil and Song 2016). SMA couplers are recently used in offshore hydraulic control equipment as a tubing solution replacing welded joints (Karakoc et al 2021).…”

A review of shape memory material’s applications in the offshore oil and gas industry

“…The amount of force produced by a SMA element and its frequency can be adjusted by carefully selecting its thickness and length. For instance, a thin film SMA foil has been used to develop a high frequency compact pump (to generate 90 N force) while 7×7 strand SMA cables has been used to generate low frequency hydraulic accumulator (to generate 180 kN force) (Shin et al 2004, Shin et al 2005, Patil and Song 2016. This force can be useful for many different situations.…”

A phenomenological constitutive model for one-dimensional shape memory alloys based on artificial neural network

“…S hape M emory A lloys (SMA) have unique properties because of their unique ability to reversibly transform when subjected to appropriate thermal and/or mechanical loads (Lagoudas, 2008). Therefore it has considerable application prospects in many fields (Mohd Jani et al, 2014), such as oil and gas industry (Patil and Song, 2016), autonomous air vehicles (Pellone et al, 2017), wind energy (Das et al, 2019), surgical tools (Roshan et al, 2019), space exploration (Costanza et al, 2017) and so on.…”