MSE Colloquium: Thodla Ramgopal, Environmentally Assisted Cracking of Subsea Pipelines in O&G Production

Abstract

Increased demand for energy has led to O&G exploration and production in some very challenging environments in particular, under high pressure high temperature conditions.  This has led to significant changes in design philosophy which is more focused on damage tolerance.  The above changes have challenged the materials and corrosion community to understand and quantify environmentally assisted cracking of steels of range of materials from steels to high strength nickel based alloys.  This challenges associated with developing test methods to generate design information in sour service and seawater environments will be discussed along with an attempt to understand the underlying that may be applied to develop predictive tools.

Bio

Ramgopal Thodla has been working at DNV GL for the last 10 years, where he is currently Head of Section for Materials Technology Development.   He leads a team of 32, with 10 Ph.D's, 5 MS, and 6 BS.  The group has one of largest sour service corrosion facilities in the world developing materials solutions for the developing materials and corrosion solutions for the O&G, power generation, and nuclear waste industry.  Prior to working at DNV GL he was GE-Global Research Center in Bangalore and Schenectady for 6.5 years.