Sum wins ASME 2017 Arthur Lubinski Best Paper Award

Amadeu Sum, associate professor of chemical and biological engineering, has been awarded the 2017 Arthur Lubinski OTC Best Paper Award by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME).

This prestigious recognition is awarded annually during the Offshore Technology Conference (OTC) by the ASME Petroleum Division to a contribution that has the highest impact on the offshore industry. The award is named after Arthur Lubinski, who created the ASME Study Committee for the Exchange of Offshore Information that led to the formation of OTC.

Greg Kusinski, Amadeu Sum, Joseph Gomes
From left to right: Greg Kusinski, Amadeu Sum, Joseph Gomes receive the award at the OTC2017 ASME Banquet.

Sum received the award for his paper “Hydrate Management for Systems with High Salinity Brines at Ultra-High Pressures,” coauthored with Yue Hu and Bo Ram Lee, Colorado School of Mines; Prasad Karanjkar, ConocoPhillips; Joseph Gomes, DeepStar; and Greg Kusinski, Chevron. This paper was selected from the hundreds of submissions that were presented at OTC2017 in Houston, Texas.

The work was inspired by an engineering challenge initiated by DeepStar, a joint industry technology development consortium of 12 oil and gas companies, seeking to support deepwater high-pressure, high-temperature (HPHT) field development activities in the Gulf of Mexico.

In order to conduct research in these extreme conditions, the research team engineered a novel HPHT experimental chamber in which a series of experiments was conducted. This work enabled the delivery of a computational model that can serve as a practical engineering tool for Industry to better predict undesired hydrate plug formations, allowing for optimization of methanol treatment.

Sum’s work verified and validated industry’s understanding of thermodynamics relative to hydrate formation in high salinity and HPHT systems, proving fundamentally important to the development of HPHT fields.

The Lubinski Best Paper Award was presented to Sum and his coauthors on May 1 at the ASME Best Mechanical Engineering Award Banquet.

Contact:
Agata Bogucka, Communications Manager, College of Earth Resource Sciences & Engineering | 303-384-2657 | abogucka@mines.edu
Mark Ramirez, Managing Editor, Communications and Marketing | 303-273-3088 | ramirez@mines.edu
 
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Colorado School of Mines is a public R1 research university focused on applied science and engineering, producing the talent, knowledge and innovations to serve industry and benefit society – all to create a more prosperous future.