PHMSA 11-15
Thursday, September 30, 2015
Contact: Artealia Gilliard
Tel: 202-366-4831
Program Offers Research Funding for University-Affiliated Projects
WASHINGTON – The U.S. Department of Transportation's Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration today awarded nearly $2 million to 11 universities to research new ideas and technologies that will improve the safety of the nation's energy transportation pipelines. PHMSA has provided almost $3.5 million for student and faculty researchers since 2013 as part of its Competitive Academic Agreement Program (CAAP); the latest round of awards is more than double the amount that PHMSA awarded the previous year.
"The Competitive Academic Agreement Program pays for critical research into safety technologies and mechanisms that could improve safety throughout the entire pipeline sector," said U.S. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx. "These investments have contributed to new pipeline technologies that are being used across the country to improve pipeline safety."
PHMSA launched CAAP to engage students enrolled in graduate and Ph.D. programs to research common pipeline safety challenges and demonstrate how their engineering or other technical backgrounds may contribute to the field of pipeline safety. This year's applicants received as much as $300,000 for their proposed studies on topics such as calculating pipe toughness, enabling plastic pipeline detection, protecting pipelines from corrosion, and detecting methane emissions.
"Thanks to support from Congress, PHMSA has invested nearly $93 million dollars in R&D projects that have resulted in 22 patent applications and 25 new pipeline technologies," said PHMSA Administrator Marie Therese Dominguez. "Above-ground, radar-based pipeline mapping and a nondestructive testing method for unpiggable pipelines are among the many technological advances that wouldn't have been possible without federal investment. We're looking forward to new innovation that emerges as a result of this next round of CAAP projects."
Proposals were evaluated on their relevance to PHMSA's mission, scientific merit, feasibility and past institutional performance. PHMSA intends to adopt the most promising findings into its core research program for further, long-term investigation.
For more information, please visit the Research & Development section of PHMSA's website at: phmsa.dot.gov.
| University | Focus Area | Project Title | Award |
|---|---|---|---|
|
Arizona State University |
Development of Inspection Tools to Quantify Pipe Strength and Toughness |
Bayesian network inference and information fusion for accurate pipe strength and toughness estimation |
$300,000.00 |
|
University of North Dakota Energy & Environmental Research Center |
Intrinsically Locatable Plastic Materials |
Application of amorphous metal foil for plastic pipeline detection |
$100,000.00 |
|
University of Alaska at Anchorage |
Preventing or Mitigating Pipeline Corrosion |
Corrosion under insulation: innovative solutions to cold climate corrosion challenges |
$214,321.00 |
|
University of Akron |
Preventing or Mitigating Pipeline Corrosion |
Understanding and mitigating the threat of AC induced corrosion on buried pipelines |
$238,424.00 |
|
North Dakota State University |
Preventing or Mitigating Pipeline Corrosion |
Mitigating pipeline corrosion using a smart thermal spraying coating system |
$299,607.00 |
|
Rutgers State University |
Preventing or Mitigating Pipeline Corrosion |
An inorganic composite coating for pipeline rehabilitation and corrosion protection |
$279,308.00 |
|
University of Tulsa |
Intrinsically Locatable Plastic Materials |
Electromagnetic Strategies for Locatable Plastic Pipe |
$297, 432.00 |
|
University of Colorado Denver |
Intrinsically Locatable Plastic Materials |
Embedded Passive RF Tags towards Intrinsically Locatable Buried Plastic Materials |
$100,000.00 |
|
West Virginia University |
Intrinsically Locatable Plastic Materials |
Advancement in the area of intrinsically locatable Plastic materials |
$100,000.00 |
|
University of Missouri (Curators-Rolla) |
Preventing or Mitigating Pipeline Corrosion |
Chemically Bonded Porcelain Enamel Coated Pipe for Corrosion Protection and Flow Efficiency |
$35,000.00 |
|
University of Colorado at Boulder |
Methane Detection |
Small-Scale DIAL for methane detection |
$35, 908.00 |
The Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration develops and enforces regulations for the safe, reliable, and environmentally sound operation of the nation's 2.6 million mile pipeline transportation system and the nearly 1 million daily shipments of hazardous materials by land, sea, and air. Please visit http://phmsa.dot.gov for more information.