Subsea engineering students enrolled in the “Design of Subsea Blowout Preventers” course at the UH Cullen College of Engineering took part in a once-in-a-lifetime field trip to tour the research and development (R&D) laboratories at the energy giant Cameron, a leading provider of flow equipment products, systems and services to the worldwide energy industry.
Johnnie Kotrla, engineering advisor at Cameron, and Larry Earles, senior principal engineer at OneSubsea, organized the field trip to give UH subsea engineering students an inside look at the inner-workings of Blowout Preventers (BOPs), which are an assembly of wellheads, connectors, gate valves and chokes fitted at the top of an oil well to prevent a blowout such as the 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill. Kotrla and Earles personally showed students through the product showcase room, where full-sized replicas of BOP components were on display.
After receiving specialized safety instructions, the UH subsea engineers entered Cameron’s R&D laboratory, where Kotrla and Earles introduced them to BOPs with different sizes and pressure ratings.
Teaching assistant Ishan Sharma particularly enjoyed watching less-enthused students begin to connect-the-dots between their classroom lectures and the real-world applications of those lessons.
“Several of the students who’d seemed to be muddling through the semester perked up after seeing the real equipment and asked some very intelligent questions to the instructor and Dr. Earles during the tour,” Sharma said.
Subsea students were also introduced to the different components of BOPs and their varying design criterias to have a better understanding of the real-world challenges when designing BOPs.
“The lab tour bridged the gap between our classroom lectures and real BOP design. This tour sparked interest in these BOPs and it was successful beyond expectations,” Sharma said.