News Archive

UWA's offshore engineering researchers at COFS and the School of Civil and Resource Engineering swept the board in the Australian Gas Technology Innovation Awards, held this week at the AGT Conference. In the pre-commercial category, two UWA entries could not be separated by the judges and were announced as joint winners.

The first winner was UWA's O-Tube Program, which is developing new methods for the design of subsea pipelines, accounting for ocean-pipeline-seabed interaction. UWA's O-tube technology is globally unique and allows the seabed conditions during cyclones to be mimicked at large scale in the laboratory. Congratulations to the O-tube team: Liang Cheng, David White, Hongwei An, Scott Draper, Tuarn Brown, Chengcai Luo, Qin Zhang, Henning Mohr and Alex Duff. This is the fourth award scooped by the O-tube since it began operations three years ago.

The second winner was UWA's Remote Intelligent Geotechnical Seabed Survey technology. RIGSS is taking a new approach to seabed characterisation: better tools, operated robotically. These tools include our hemiball and toroidal penetrometers, and new technology derived from our centrifuge facilities to control these tools robotically at the seabed. Congratulations to the RIGSS team: David White, David Russell-Cargill, Yue Yan, Sam Stanier, Conleth O'loughlin and Mark Randolph. A new JIP is planned around this technology, kicking off later in the year.

Media references

Professor David White, Shell EMI Professor of Offshore Engineering (Project Manager) [email protected]

or Dr Sam Stanier, Research Fellow (Lead Researcher) [email protected]