Finding fugitive emissions

The control and management of fugitive emissions is becoming even more important for safety compliance, and the techniques used to identify them are becoming more accurate. Sean Ottewell reports.

Cameras equipped with infrared (IR) technology are quickly becoming an essential tool in the chemical manufacturing and other industries in the detection of fugitive emissions - the leaks in pipe connections and seals that are difficult to detect.
Although use of the IR cameras is only just becoming a requirement of the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), LyondellBasell began using the technology in 2005. The initial results from their use in ground and aerial surveys at the Channelview and La Porte, Texas, plants and also at the plants in Morris and Tuscola, Illinois, were very promising and IR cameras are now an important part of plant equipment at the company's sites (Fig. 1).
The use of IR cameras enables the company to pinpoint the exact location of leaks that might have remained hidden using traditional fugitive monitoring techniques. In only minutes, an operator can aim, pan and zoom as far as several hundred feet away from an area and check for leaks without having to move. Traditional methods for identifying fugitive emissions required placement of an instrument probe directly on the component, which is a challenge for components high in a pipe rack.
Another advantage is the detection of particularly elusive emissions that leak from corrosion beneath insulation. These leaks have historically been a challenge and many times impossible to pinpoint because the vapours often exit at points a considerable distance from the source point. The IR camera can very easily detect the source of these leaks by simply following the trail of the hydrocarbon plume.

Law enforcement

The Dutch Environmental Protection Agency (DCMR) is using a FLIR GF320 optical gas imaging camera from French company FLIR Advanced Thermal Solutions to help with inspection and law enforcement in and around the port of Rotterdam where many chemical companies are located.

The tasks of the DCMR include regulation of all the industries in the area and monitoring and assisting authorities on developing environmental policy. The DCMR issues permits to virtually all of the 22,000 enterprises in the area and carries out more than 9000 inspections to monitor compliance with the permit conditions.

Earlier field studies found that emissions for volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in the area were 3-4 times that reported by the industries present.

After comparing several techniques Rob van Doorn, technical manager of the DCMR and his colleagues opted for the FLIR GF320 optical gas imaging camera. "The external consultants we had hired previously utilised technologies like solar occultation flux (SOF) and differential absorption light detection and ranging (DIAL). Although these techniques are robust and can quantify the emissions these technologies are very expensive to purchase, they are unwieldy, requiring large trucks to carry the equipment, and also complicated to use, requiring a lot of training to be used effectively. In comparison the GF-Series camera is a much more affordable solution. It is also compact, lightweight, portable, and it is very easy to use, requiring very little training," he said.

So the initial focus for using the camera will be on inspecting storage tanks, vapour recovery units, and VOC handling activities of refineries and storage and handling facilities. The camera will be used to develop a standard and solid working method that can be used as a law enforcement tool.

The US National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) is using a range of techniques including near IR and thermal IR to detect and monitor fugitive emissions of carbon dioxide stored in geologic formations.

By providing an accurate accounting of stored carbon dioxide and a high level of confidence that the carbon dioxide will permanently remain in storage, these efforts can help ensure the technical soundness and economic viability of carbon sequestration, a technology that is critical to meeting the national goal of reduced greenhouse gas emissions.

Migration pathways

To identify possible carbon dioxide migration pathways, NETL scientists are investigating surface and near-surface characteristics by combining satellite and aerial photography with remote sensing, ground-penetrating radar, and ground-based measurements. In co-operation with regional sequestration partnerships, long- and short-term carbon dioxide monitoring is being conducted at depleted oil wells, saline aquifers, and coal-bed methane test sites.

For example, using ground-penetrating radar, NETL found extremely low levels of carbon dioxide leakage associated with subsurface thinning and faulting under the sandy soil at the West Pearl Queen, New Mexico, depleted oil well sequestration test site. NETL registered similar low levels of leakage using several techniques to monitor the Frio saline aquifer sequestration test site near Houston, Texas.

Tracer compounds

A novel technique NETL used at both the West Pearl Queen and Frio sites to monitor sequestered carbon dioxide is to add chemically inert perfluorocarbon tracer compounds to the carbon dioxide stream being sequestered, and then detect any resulting tracer emissions in soil-gas at extremely low concentrations. NETL developed the protocol for tracer detection and quantification, the soil sampling pump, and several sampling systems.

Other NETL-developed techniques are capable of monitoring fugitive emissions of non-carbon dioxide greenhouse gases such as methane.

Perfluorocarbon tracers in a syringe pump located in the back of the NETL van are being added to carbon dioxide as it is injected underground at the Frio saline aquifer sequestration test site near Houston, Texas.

Sustainable urban infrastructure key as African cities grow

African cities would grow nearly three times faster than the global average over the next three-and-a-half decades, highlighting the need for efficient, effective and environmentally sustainable urban infrastructure development.

More than 70 African cities would boast a population bigger than one-million people by 2050, financial services firm KPMG Global Center of Excellence for Cities leader David O’Brien said on Monday.

“In the developing world, the urban population is expected to jump by more than 1.3-billion over the next two decades, with each new entrant seeking better employment opportunities and a higher quality of living. This is most predominant in China, India and Africa.”

KPMG South African Center of Excellence for Cities leader Kobus Fourie noted that African cities would grow 267% by 2050, while global cities would expand 94%.

“We have issues that we really need to tackle now, before the significant growth starts,” he said at a media briefing in Johannesburg.

Fourie said KPMG would meet with executive mayors of the top six metropolitans in South Africa, National Treasury, academics and the Presidency to discuss rural and urban planning and development opportunities in the country.

O’Brien called for strong leadership from political and business leaders on urban development and the impact of cities on economic growth, social wellbeing, climate change and sustainability. “Future projects in city planning will not be successful if there is no political drive or will behind it. If there are strong leaders, who have the insight to manage their cities correctly, we will see thriving cities.”

KPMG’s ‘Infrastructure 100’ report has found that architects, planners, politicians and economists were now all working together to deliver spaces that promote better urban living for inhabitants.

KPMG Global Center of Excellence for Cities chairperson Mick Allworth said developers and planners could learn a lot from Eastern countries, particularly China and Japan.

The report showcased Fujisawa Smart town in Japan, which would consist of 1 000 green homes, each equipped with solar power units and fuel cells, which would be connected to a smart grid to manage supply and demand, with an aim to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions by 70%, compared with a typical Japanese town.

Delta Property Fund sets Nov 2 listing date

Property loan stock company Delta Property Fund was expected to raise R980-million in a JSE listing on November 2.

The group, which would list up to 119.5-million shares at R8.20, secured several “precommittments” for an aggregate amount of R970-million, of which R850-million or 103.6-million linked units were accepted.

The commitments were sourced from Coronation Asset Management, Stanlib Asset Management, the Public Investment Corporation, Momentum Asset Management and Grindrod Asset Management.

Delta would use the net proceeds of the listing to fund a portion of its R2.1-billion portfolio, while reducing overall gearing levels.

The remainder of the cost of capital would be financed through bank debt, resulting in a loan-to-value ratio of approximately 40%, Delta said in a statement.

Delta’s portfolio comprises 20 buildings totalling a gross lettable area of 203 261 m², with 92% office space and an 8% retail component.

Video: MABEL Mimics Human Gait

Make way for MABEL, a new humanoid robot developed by university researchers that can walk and climb stairs like humans but which they claim is even more physically agile and energy efficient than its predecessor, Petman.

MABEL was developed by researchers from Oregon State University (OSU) and the University of Michigan, who took their cues from human locomotion to create a walking and running robot with a spring in its step -- literally, OSU assistant professor Jonathan Hurst, who led the robot’s mechanical design, said in an interview with Design News. Professor Jessy Grizzle at Michigan was in charge of MABEL’s control engineering.

“There are great big springs [in the robot’s leg joints] made of the fiberglass material used in an archery bow,” Hurst told us. “That nice big spring allows it to absorb energy and bounce on it… just like [human] tendons.”

Professor Jonathan Hurst, right, tinkers with MABEL, a humanoid robot that has a natural human gait.
MABEL can walk, run, and climb stairs using a natural spring in its joints.
(Source: Oregon State University)

Funded in part by a $4.7 million research grant from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) -- the same backers of Boston Dynamics' Petman robot, which also can run and walk up and down stairs -- MABEL runs on a lithium polymer battery rather than a gasoline-powered engine, like Petman. The National Science Foundation also financially backed the project.

In addition to this focus on energy efficiency, MABEL’s designers -- who recently won a 2012 World-Changing Innovation award from Popular Mechanics for the robot -- also made a concerted effort to create MABEL with a “human-like or animal-like gait that is just as agile but takes less energy to get around."

“It really looks human-like,” Hurst says. “It if walks up steps and stumbles, it then steps up again… It really looks like a person climbing stairs.” He told us one of the keys to this motion is that MABEL, like humans, is constantly performing a balancing act as it moves, making its movements appear more natural.

Powered by an offboard computer and energy source, MABEL will soon have a next-generation companion, ATRIAS, which will bring its artificial intelligence and power source onboard, Hurst told us. This will allow ATRIAS to “walk around outside,” as well as step sideways, something MABEL can’t do. It also will include more powerful motors yet be lighter than MABEL.

Hurst said he and his team are building three identical copies of ATRIAS that will be distributed among OSU, Michigan, and Carnegie Mellon University as part of ongoing research to create robots that move as naturally as humans do. He foresees a number of applications for this research, including the development of exoskeletons and robots to help people suffering from paralysis to walk, something companies like Ekso Bionics are doing.

Creating robots with a natural spring in their joints also will lend itself to future development of prosthetic limbs that give amputees a more natural gait and range of motion, as well as the ability to dynamically adjust their step. Additionally, the research is conducive to the creation of humanoid robots that can be used in disaster scenarios, such as those being designed as part of DARPA’s Robotics Challenge, Hurst said.

“Just having robots in the environment -- what we’re doing is very related,” he said, comparing it to the human movement of climbing a ladder, something that might be needed in a disaster-response scenario. “Once we can understand how that control works -- and we’ve just demonstrated that -- then people can be building systems that are better every year.”

New Standard Will Cut EV Charging Time

The Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) approved a revised standard last week that will let electrified vehicles charge their batteries much quicker -- in as little as 10 minutes for plug-in hybrids or 20 minutes for battery-electric cars. The standard brings new technology to public charging stations and parking garages, but not to homes.

"Before, it was a matter of hours to charge an electric vehicle battery," Andrew Smart, director ofSAE International, told us. "Now it will be a matter of minutes."

The J1772 standard calls for so-called DC fast charging, using voltages ranging from 200V to 500V and currents of up to 200A. Earlier versions described methods using voltages of 120V or 240V and currents of 15A or 80A. Using the new technology, plug-in hybrids will be able to go from 0 percent to 80 percent charge in 10 minutes; battery-electrics could go from 20 percent to 80 percent in 20 minutes.

GM's Spark EV could be the first to employ the new DC fast charging standard.
(Source: GM)

The standard calls for connectors and electrical interfaces with two extra pins on board. Electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids already on the road, such as the Chevy Volt, will not be able to use the new technology immediately, since they don't have the new hardware and software. However, Kevin Kelly, a spokesman for General Motors, told us its forthcoming Spark battery-electric vehicle will have the new connector, interface, and software. "It's less important to do this on the Chevy Volt, because the Volt already has extended range on board," he said. "But it makes a lot of sense for the Spark EV."

The J1772 standard was created in 1996. It was revised in 2001 for use with a paddle-type connector and again in 2010 with a continued focus on AC charging. The new version is the first to address DC fast charging and the first to describe voltages as high as 500V and currents as much as 200A.

The standard reflects a consensus of 190 global experts representing makers of automobiles and charging equipment, as well as utilities, national labs, and municipalities. The experts had to consider the effects of temperature, humidity, and moisture, as well as mechanical aspects.

"You have people who are constantly plugging and unplugging it," Smart said. "You need to know everything, including the fatigue levels of the wires, connectors, and plastics. You also need to get input from people on the infrastructure side -- you've got people who write building codes, and you've got municipalities. It's not just the automakers."

Automakers say the technology could have a profound effect on the sale of pure electric vehicles, many of which require eight or more hours of charging. "This is a standard that everyone was waiting for," Smart said. "Everyone wanted it to be done quickly. But when it comes to developing a consensus between 190 technical specialists, it takes time."

Mechanical Engineering Is on the Rise

During a childhood visit to the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., Margaret Anderson caught the space-travel bug. She knew then and there she wanted to work for NASA.

It wasn't just a passing fancy. Now 21, Anderson is a student at the Rochester Institute of Technology, working simultaneously on her master's and bachelor's degrees in mechanical engineering. And she's living her dream. Anderson is employed at the space agency through a student co-op program and is working on hybrid rockets—experimental power plants that combine solid and liquid fuel technologies to find a cheaper, safer way into space.

If it sounds counterintuitive that a fledgling rocket scientist is earning degrees in mechanical engineering, it seemed that way to Anderson at first. She admits she was initially "disappointed" that RIT has made aerospace engineering part of its mechanical engineering program. Now, though, she's "really glad I decided to do it." Mechanical engineering, she says, has given her a wider understanding of engineering, and that has helped her grapple with the myriad issues involved in rocket technology.

Rocket science. Mechanical engineering is all about designing, building, and maintaining machines of all types and sizes. It's an engineering classic, dating to the early days of the industrial revolution, when engineering know-how was needed to harness the potential of the steam engine. But despite its 19th-century pedigree, M.E. is today at the heart of many cutting-edge technologies.

That makes it a hot choice for students. It's by far the most popular undergraduate degree in engineering; according to the American Society for Engineering Education, 16,063 undergrad degrees were awarded in 2006. At the graduate level, it's the third-most-popular discipline among engineering master's and is back in first place among doctorates.

Why the demand? M.E. students have to master key elements of chemical, civil, and electrical engineering, as well as physics and advanced mathematics, particularly calculus. "The breadth of mechanical engineering is unique," explains Larry Silverberg, the associate head of the mechanical and aerospace engineering program at North Carolina State University. "And, no question, that's a selling point."

That's particularly true for M.E. students who go to graduate school, with its focus on a narrow area of study. The broadness of the degree means they have a wide array of possibilities to choose from. Traditionally, many mechanical engineers headed for automotive and aerospace, but energy, robotics, and bioengineering are growth areas, too, as is nanotechnology—which is, after all, the manipulation of particles at the nano-level to build microsize machines.

Silverberg singles out three sectors critical to America's future: energy, security and defense, and healthcare. "Mechanical engineering plays a big role in all three of those," he says.

Ewan Pritchard, who is completing his Ph.D. in mechanical engineering at North Carolina State, is head of the hybrid program at Advanced Energy, a company that recently unveiled the first commercially available plug-in hybrid vehicle, a school bus. He's passionate about developing alternative-fuel vehicles, which is why M.E. was his choice.

"The coming decade is going to be the decade of energy, and when you think energy, you think mechanical engineering," says Pritchard, 35. That's because, as Iowa State University M.E. Prof. Robert C. Brown explains, mechanical engineers are not only experts in thermodynamics—the study and uses of energy—they know how to apply its laws to bring machines to life.

There are four main subdisciplines within M.E.—thermodynamics and fluids, solid mechanics, dynamics and controls, and manufacturing—so students learn early on to work on interdisciplinary teams. And cross-disciplinary research dominates both academia and industry today. "Most of the best research is at the edges of disciplines," where they abut one another, says Joseph Beaman, chairman of the M.E. department at the University of Texas-Austin. Many M.E. departments also encourage students to take biology and business classes to enhance their multidisciplinary capacity.

We're No. 1. The range of skills common to mechanical engineering graduates also goes over well in the job market. At Austin, many M.E. students are top prospects on the wish lists of companies scouting prospective hires. Edward Hensel, head of mechanical engineering at rit, says "there's a powerful, pent-up demand in industry for mechanical engineers. In more than 20 years as a teacher, I've not seen the like of it before."

The Future for Financial Engineering?

Financial engineering has been blamed for its role in triggering each and every one of the most notable disasters that have occurred in international financial markets since the Black Monday crash of October 19^th 1987.  Synthetic portfolio insurance programmes were central in triggering the stock market crash of October 1987.  Not to forget the influence of human psychology, hubris and greed in particular, it was the excess and easy availability of leverage combined with supposedly ‘low risk’ arbitrage trading that contributed to the collapse of the Long Term Capital Management hedge fund in the Fall of 1998.  Again it was derivatives based innovations which underlay the collapse of Enron in late 2001.  More recently, it was the widespread adoption of the Gaussian-Copula ‘magic formula’ in fuelling the massive growth in CDS and CDO markets which led to the dual credit cum liquidity global financial crisis of late 2008-2009.  In each of these cases, financial engineers and derivatives traders have been to the forefront of the financial innovations which, for a while at least, brought huge profits to the financial institutions involved, and a supposedly more controlled if not benign risk environment for the clients of those institutions.

You might well ask – given the consequences for the stability of global financial markets, is the ‘computationally scientific’ discipline of Financial Engineering (like it’s not too distant computationally scientific relation Nuclear Engineering) an inherently negative or potentially destructive knowledge domain ?  Should the financial innovation genie be firmly put back in its box, to be forgotten about but possibly left to be re-discovered by some unsuspecting future generation ?  The answers to each of these questions are firmly in the negative.  Lessons have to be, and are being, learned by the incumbent generation.  With stricter and hopefully better informed financial regulation coming quickly down the tracks in the form of Dodd-Frank, Basel III, Mifid II (Markets in Financial Instruments Directive) and Emir (European Market Infrastructure Regulation), the brakes may be well and truly applied to the financial engineering arms race that has typified the surge in financial innovation that has occurred in the international financial markets of the last 25 years or so.  However, this will not signal the death knell of financial innovation.  This author believes that a more controlled and better understood form of financial engineering will continue to thrive.  Investors will continue to demand innovative wealth-management products which better balance their tolerance for risk, expectations for return and needs for liquidity.  The aviation industry, and in particular the aviation leasing sector, for example represents an end user likely to benefit from this more controlled and better understood form of financial innovation and risk management.  This author is actively collaborating with industry partners to bring the ‘best parts’ of financial engineering best-practice to bear in the creation of structured hedges which will significantly mitigate the operating cost uncertainties faced by airlines, and add shareholder value as a result.

Financial engineering will also continue to be taught in leading business schools – but of necessity through a more interactive and experiential delivery mechanism by academics, who themselves must become more industry facing, relevant and connected in their research.  Finance students – the financial engineers, traders, risk managers and regulators of tomorrow – are already being taught how to apply financial engineering insights and knowledge, adapting and refining their insights using the feedback signals provided by market simulators, potential future exposure stress-tests, and strategy back-testing using the ever more extensive back-filled financial databases which are now available from suppliers such as Bloomberg.  Behavioural Finance theorists will play an increasingly important role in the development, refinement and application of Finance theory.  In short, the international financial services industry will continue to demand that Finance graduates combine a quantitatively-founded understanding of market dynamics and financial risk, but will equally expect that these graduates possess the added ability to de-mystify and apply complex financial models with a mix of common sense and keen intuition.