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Vol. 231 No.1 |
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| DAVID MICHAEL COHEN, MANAGING EDITOR |
From the oil field to the operating room, it’s all about pumps and pipes
It’s often hard to predict how the inventions created to advance one industry will find applications in others. The microwave oven was invented because American engineer Percy Spencer discovered that a chocolate bar he had in his pocket while working on an active radar set had melted. The fiberglass fabric created for the spacesuits worn by NASA astronauts is now used for roofing at several airports and sports stadiums around the world. The Gutenberg printing press borrowed screw technology used in wine and olive presses of the time, and Silly Putty was born out of an attempt to create a synthetic rubber during the shortages of World War II.
But occasionally, the mechanics of two industries and their problems are so similar that it’s only natural for experts in one field to find solutions in the other. That’s what Houston cardiovascular surgeon Alan Lumsden was thinking a few years ago as he visited the Ocean Star, a retired jackup drilling rig in nearby Galveston that was converted into an oil and gas museum. Soon after that visit, Lumsden—the medical director of the Methodist DeBakey Heart and Vascular Center—met some ExxonMobil drilling folks at a social event. The conversation turned to the remarkable overlap of their professions.
Both cardiology and the oil business involve the movement of fluids through long, thin tubes by means of pumps and valves. The problems common to both are myriad. Consider a clogged artery or an obstructed flowline. In either case, flow must be monitored in order to detect the problem, diagnostics are needed to locate the clog, and then you need a means of remotely imaging the clogged pipe. Then you need to restore flow, either through chemical means, mechanically clearing out the obstruction, or bypassing the clogged pipe section. Just as there are shared problems, Lumsden reasoned, there ought to be shared solutions.
A follow-up lunch in early 2007 including Dr. William E. Kline, a research manager with ExxonMobil Upstream Research Company, convinced the two to coordinate a conference where leading academics and professionals in medicine and the oil and gas industry could meet to share ideas for keeping blood pumping through the body and oil pumping through production systems. Ioannis Kakadiaris, a professor of computer science and biomedical engineering at the University of Houston, agreed to be the third coordinator, and, that November, the first Pumps and Pipes symposium was held, with a series of presentations exploring the two industries’ many areas of overlap. In 2008, the second symposium, titled “The Other Guy’s Toolkit” focused on specific capabilities and tools that each profession might borrow from the other, such as how each side uses imaging technology.
“Basically, we are developing new methods that will allow us to mine information from images,” Kakadiaris said. “These images can be from biomedical data such as MRIs, but can also be from seismic data.”
Last month, the University of Houston hosted the third Pumps and Pipes conference, titled “Better Together,” with sessions on nanotechnology, distance monitoring and surveillance, and managing conduits—whether arteries or flowlines. An expanded list of participating organizations included Apache, Baker Hughes, BP, Halliburton, Schlumberger, Shell, Metronics, Hanson Medical, Bolton Medical, Gore Medical Products and a number of universities in the Gulf Coast region.
“We have pumps, we have pipes, we drill and we image,” Kline said. “The heart people are in the flow assurance business, and so are we.”
But just because the mechanics are similar, does that mean technologies developed in the oil field can really be used in medicine, and vice versa? According to the organizers, it’s already happening. Kline described one example from last month’s conference:
“The heart people were talking about the difficulty in providing power to an artificial heart. They have to run a wire from outside of the body to power these hearts, and that becomes a source of infection. One of the oilfield people suggested that some of the new power coupling technologies that we’re taking advantage of—such as magnetic drive applications where flammable and corrosive fluids must be similarly isolated from power supply—could be used to power the heart from outside the body without running a wire.”
On a more formal level, a group of engineers from the oil and gas industry recently began a series of consultations with medical researchers from Methodist DeBakey and University of Houston mathematicians on the problem of measuring the stresses and strains experienced by repaired heart valves, using interpretation techniques that are well-established for measuring the performance of oil and gas production equipment.
Based on ideas generated by these conferences, medical researchers are investigating oil dispersion technology used to clean up spills, for application to the problem of coagulating blood cells at blood centers. Cardiologists at Methodist seeking to prevent aneurysms are gaining new perspectives of blood flow dynamics from pipeline engineers who use fluid dynamics to predict pipeline ruptures. And oilfield engineers are looking at ways to learn from the sophisticated rheology and flow models that cardiovascular researchers have developed to describe blood flow.
Even one industry’s use of a relatively non-specialized technology, such as remote communications, can provide far-reaching lessons for the other. A chronic problem in the medical profession is the physical distance that often separates specialists from patients. A presentation at last month’s conference by a Halliburton speaker showed the docs how that company manages gravel-pack operations in Africa from the other side of the globe.
“Today, engineers are talking to medical researchers about using nanoparticles to sort stem cells,” Lumsden said in a press release. “An engineer who specializes in cleaning oil spills thought of it during a discussion at the last Pumps and Pipes conference. It’s amazing the ideas that flow when energy and medical experts get together. The interaction sparks ideas that would never have materialized if we stayed in the medical center and they stayed in the oil field.” 
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