Hristina Dragovic joined the department of Energy and Process engineering at NTNU in September 2021.
Her PhD position is financed through the newly established project: “PredictCUI: prediction of water liquid and vapour migration for mitigating corrosion under insulation“.
PredictCUI answers to the RCN’s Petromaks2 call for collaborative and knowledge-building projects.
The project has been developed by SINTEF Energy AS in collaboration with NTNU, Equinor, Gassco, Shell, Sintef Digital and Technische Universität Eindhoven.
Hristina’s supervisors are Professor Ole Jørgen Nydal (NTNU) and Åsmund Ervik (SINTEF).
WELCOME to Hristina !
Hristina introduces her activities as follow:
“The project for my Ph.D. is part of the project named PredictCUI: “Experimental investigation of moisture transport in mineral wool“
The pipe is insulated using open fibrous materials such as mineral wool and the insulation is protected from water ingress using a thin metal which is called cladding, but protection is never perfect, so water will enter in some locations and migrate through the insulation, causing the spread of corrosion, a common problem known as Corrosion under Insulation (CUI). This problem affects mostly petroleum and chemical industries.
The research project PredictCUI will focus on building the physical understanding of the problem and developing humidity monitoring system that will help to locate where water has entered the system and improve the understanding of humidity transport in pipe insulation in general.
Specially, the research work will consist of laboratory measurements that will be performed to improve understanding of transport mechanisms of liquid water as well as water vapor (diffusion of water vapor, transport of liquid water through capillarity, evaporation/condensation) in the highly open porous insulation materials.
Laboratory measurements will provide measured data that need to be collected and analysed using computer code that will be developed for this purpose.
In the PredictCUI project, measurements within experimental work package WP2 will be performed on three different temporal and spatial scales, in three different setups: annular setup, cross-sectional setup, experiments performed on NMR setup.
Researchers including experimentalists from industry partners, NTNU EPT (Department of Energy and Process Engineering) and SINTEF will collaborate in this project.“
Several employees at PoreLab are also involved in the Project PredictCUI such as Professor Øivind Wilhelmsen (department of Chemistry, NTNU), Professor Alex Hansen (department of Physics, NTNU) and PhD candidate Hyejeong Cheon. Hyejeong started her PhD in August 2020, and is developing a mathematical model of water liquid and vapor (two-phase flow) transports in pore network to understand how and where CUI occurs.