TAMUCC gets drone grant

By Lee Sausley

CORPUS CHRISTI –

Thanks to a half-million dollar grant from the National Science Foundation Texas A&M-Corpus Christi will soon add a new drone to it’s fleet of unmanned aircraft. It will be the school’s largest drone yet, and it will be used to develop a sensor package that can detect gas emissions from oil and gas pipelines and processing facilities.

The three year grant totals $539,000 and some of that  money will purchase one a drone called a Seahunter. It has a 16-foot wingspan. and a 100-lb payload capacity. That is significantly larger the 25 lbs  carried by the RS-16., which is currently the largest drone in the university’s fleet.

Dr. Ahmed Mahdy, director of innovation in computing research,  says the additional capacity of the Seahunter is necessary to carry the various types of sensors needed to gather the kind of information required by the nation science foundation grant.

Mahdy says, “Some of the imagery sensors will be optical just like you know your camera your digital cameras as well as infra and spectral type of camera and so that will be in conjunction with other air quality sensors that measure methane, helium,  carbon dioxide, and isotopes.

The  data from those instruments will be coupled with smart software for both on-board and post-flight analysis. The  primary goal is to develop a sensor package that can detect gas emissions from oil and gas pipelines and processing facilities.

The ability to do that cheaply and effectively would be extremely useful in the Eagle Ford shale region where locations are often remote, and testing by standard means is difficult And costly.

Beyond that, Dr. Mahdy says the sensor package could be modified for lot of others uses, everything monitoring infrastructure integrity, to asset inspections, and security. In the state of Texas alone  we have more than 350,000 miles of oil and gas pipelines, 3,000  miles of coastline, 1,300  miles of power lines, and 1,200 miles of border.

Dr, Mahdy says meeting those need will have lots of beneficial impacts,”First and foremost is our community,.we see this in a way that will impact economic development, by facilitating the discovery of oil and gas, But not only that, it will also hopefully insure a compliance industry,and for the  energy sector it will help make well informed decisions that would  enable more efficient and cost-effective operations.”

http://www.kristv.com/story/30523486/tamucc-gets-drone-grant