Current Events: Leaky Leaky

2016 has been a big year for oil pipeline leaks. After a long and ridiculous battle between the standing rock protesters and the Energy Transfer Partners (ETP), finally, the Dakota access pipeline is going to be re-routed. For those of you who still think that these protesters are "anti-energy," I would urge you to look 200 miles away, where a crude oil pipeline leaked into Ash Coulee Creek this past week.

Picture from the Ash Coulee Creek leak 

The significance of this leak is that it happened so soon after the decision to re-route the Dakota Access Pipeline; the actual occurrence of this leak is in no way surprising. This isn't the first time this Bell Fourche Pipeline has failed; according to the US Department of Transportation, the Bell Fourche company has "had 10 reported spills over the past five years. Those spills accounted for the loss of nearly 5,000 barrels of oil and caused $2.26 million in property damage." Clearly, to this company the cost of leaking twice a year is not enough for them to invest in better pipes. Here are more oil pipeline statistics in the U.S. For your convenience, here is a chart that summarizes all the stats:

Over the last 20 years, oil leaks have cost almost $7 Billion dollars in the U.S. Not to mention, there are fatalities associated with these incidents, which no amount of money can quantify. These pipelines leak all the time! No wonder the Standing Rock protesters stood in the cold for countless hours. 

So why do these pipelines leak all the time? There are multiple reasons, the most important being lack of inspections. As we learned in class, higher viscosity fluids require greater pressure to move, which is why costs are already high for these companies that transport crude oil. Thus, they compensate by not putting in the money required for inspections of these often aging pipelines. If these companies considered oil leaks truly unacceptable, they would invest in more secure pipes that can last the wear and tear of the whether. Further, going back to the high cost of moving the crude oil, the companies don't even want to shut down the pipeline if they do hypothetically find an issue. The opportunity cost of stopping and starting is probably so high (once again due to the viscous nature of crude oil) that they'd rather wait to stop only if they desperately need to. 

This oil spill right near Standing rock taught all pipeline enthusiasts a lesson--pipe standards for oil transportation is not where they need to be. So even if Standing Rock is safe, the Dakota Access Pipeline should be considered an accident waiting to happen wherever it is built. The same can be said about the Keystone Pipeline. We cannot let the lucrative nature of the oil business blind us from the fact that oil pipeline standards are poor, and that there needs to be some intervention (unlikely to happen in the next 4 years). Additionally, if a country like the U.S. doesn't have appropriate investment in these pipelines, you can imagine the state of countries like Venezuela, which have inferior technology and an economic dependence on oil. Unless something is changed, get ready for more oil spills.

Life Isn't Steady

Transport Student A: "So what do we do?" 

Transport Student B: "Well, at least we can assume steady-state, so let's cut that term out of the Navier-Stokes equation."

Does the above dialogue sound familiar? Those two lines are basically how most fluid mechanics or transport students begin their problem sets. Well, students from Princeton University and University of Virginia show in the video below that natural phenomena, like bugs flying and dolphins swimming really fast, cannot be explained by cutting the unsteady term out of the equation. If the unsteady term is not taken into account, the average bee would fall and the average dolphin would not be able to swim at 34 miles per hour. 

What this video is really about is explaining how animals have been able to achieve very efficient motion through fluids due to their body shape and unsteady movement of fins/wings. This unsteady movement apparently reduces the drag (viscous drag) for the animals. The perfect example of this is the Manta Ray. Apparently Manta Rays are 95% efficient in propulsion. Further, our modern day propellers, which are basically fans in water, are in fact very inefficient. Basically the video tells us that manta rays are really cool, though I am not so sure I can say the same about the corny Coldplay music they had playing in the background. Nonetheless, the researchers from the two universities wanted to imitate manta rays and possible develop a more efficient propulsion system.

What they did was pretty interesting--they scanned a manta ray fin, modeled it in CAD, made its negative, and 3-D printed it. They then used this mold and a fish pasty material to create their own artificial manta-ray fin. Additionally, they attached four rods to the mold as well, simulating the muscles. The four rods were attached to four gears and made to rotate out of phase from one another, simulating wavelike motion for the fin. The fin then actually swam at speeds in the order of magnitude of a manta ray!

To me, this shows that biological and evolutionary advancements often beat human technological advancements. Dolphins and manta rays have developed their fins over thousands of years of evolution--so do we really think that a fan in water is gonna be better than that? Imitating the rest of nature has therefore always been what scientists strive for. Finding more of these archetypes in nature can really help us advance as a society. Who knows what else we can do? Another great example of this biomimicry is water resistant clothes using the same nanoscale bumps in lotus leaves (I talk about them in one of my previous blogs!). More examples can be found in this link here.