Petroleum Development Laboratory Home Page
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The Petroleum Development Laboratory (PDL) is a research laboratory established in 1984 to conduct energy related research at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. The primary mission of PDL is to serve as center of research leading to the development of technologies to extract, upgrade, manage and commercialize Alaska's oil and gas resources. PDL Research programs include basic and applied studies of oil displacement, reservoir properties of the Alaska fields, thermal recovery, miscible flooding, improved water flooding, conventional natural gas and coal bed methane, gas hydrates, gas-to-liquids (GTL) conversion and transportation, drilling and production. |
The Laboratory Facilities at PDL include: |
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Key Research Personnel and Their Experience
PDL Director's Page
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PVT Fluid Properties Laboratory (Duckering 430)
The JEFRI PVT high pressure/high temperature apparatus is capable of measuring vapor-liquid, physical properties of crude oil/natural gas systems including, density, viscosity, vapor/liquid ratios, formation volume factors and phase compositions. Visual observations of the fluids at reservoir conditions also facilitates determination of conditions which produce complex phase behavior. The major components of JEFRI High Pressure/High Temperature PVT apparatus include, a phase behavior cell with sight glass, cathometer, rocking mechanism, capillary tube viscosimeter, temperature controlled oven, and positive displacement pumps.
- JEFRI high pressure/high temperature phase behavior cell (2)
- JEFRI capillary viscometer
- JEFRI positive displacement pump
- JEFRI opposed cylinder positive displacement pump
- Cathometer
- Transfer vessels (2)
- HP 5790A Gas chromatograph
- DMA- Mettler Paar Remote cell-Digital
- Brookfield TC500 Viscosimeter
- Blue M Oven
- Blue M Constant temperature bath
- Analytical Balance (2)
This laboratory also has a complete RUSKA phase behavior apparatus, which was replaced by JEFRI apparatus.
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Petrophysics Laboratory (Duckering 431)
Petrophysics laboratory is capable of measuring reservoir rock and fluid properties. Though, mainly used as a teaching lab, it is also housed with other research equipment which is listed below.
- Beckman Ultracentrifuge
- Chemisorb surface area measurement device
- 2-dimensional horizontal (visual) reservoir model
- 3-dimensional scaled physical model for reservoir studies
- Balance (3)
- Orion microprocessor ionalyzer-901
- Cannon Fenske Viscosimeter (2)
- DMA Mettler Paar 45SI Digital Density Meter
- RUSKA Rolling ball viscosimeter
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Miscible Displacement Laboratory (Duckering 432)
The high pressure, high temperature DBR Miscibility apparatus can be used to conduct miscibility experiments and identify minimum miscibility pressures. This equipment is designed to operate at high pressures up to 10,000 psi and at high temperatures as high as 200 oC. Extremely accurate flow control can be provided by a motorized positive displacement pump. The pump is designed to accurately meter, feed and proportionately displace liquids and gases under high pressure. The setup uses an SS slim tube, 12 meters in length and coiled to a diameter of one foot. The tube is packed with Ottawa sand and has an outside diameter of 6.4 mm. The apparatus also has a fully automated, liquid collection device and gasometer.
- JEFRI motorized positive displacement pump
- 12m long high pressure slim tube
- JEFRI high pressure capillary sight glass
- JEFRI automated liquid collection unit
- JEFRI 40lit. precision Gasometer
- Injection cell (1)
- Transfer vessels (2)
- Oven with heat controller
- Heise pressure gauge
- Differential pressure transducer
- Back pressure regulator
- Ultra clean 100, Imperial IV oven
- Blue M oven
- Vacuum Pump (2)
- Blue M Constant temperature bath
- Analytical balance (1)
This lab also has a JEFRI High Pressure Recombination Apparatus. The apparatus is equipped with temperature controlled air bath and rocking mechanism, specifically for recombining reservoir oil with solution gas to attain original reservoir fluid composition, or a fluid mixture at a specified bubble point pressure.
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Displacement (Duckering 433)
Displacement laboratory is equipped to conduct High temperature testing of advanced materials in simulated gas environments. Various equipment in this laboratory includes:
- MTS Hydraulic Testing Frame
- Autoclave and control capable of 1100°C and 650 PSI
- Oven
- Controllers and digital recorders for creating gas environment
- Syringe Pump for steam injection
- Metallographic sample preparation apparatus
- Precision Diamond saw for sample preparation
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Gas Hydrate Laboratory (Duckering 434)
This laboratory is capable of conducting gas hydrate core studies and measurement of thermodynamic and kinetic properties of gas hydrates. The list of equipment here is as follows:
- Gas hydrate coreholder
- RTE 4- Neslab refrigerated bath circulator
- Temperature controller
- Gas compressor
- Air compressor
- Jerguson liquid level gauges (2)
- Vacuum pump (2)
- Beckman conductivity meter
- Steam generator
- Omega temperature readout device
- Heise pressure gauges (5)
- Transfer Cell
- Zeiss Scope
- Exatroll Controller/Programmer
- Wet Test Flowmeter
- Freezer Chest
- Crycool CC100 Immersion Cooler
- Rocker with Controller
- Methanol -Insulated Bath
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GC/MS Analytical Laboratory (Duckering 436)
This facility is primarily used to measure the composition of crude oil streams and pyrolysis studies. Following equipment are included in this laboratory:
- HP5890GC/5970MSD apparatus with accessories including chemstation
- Pyrolysis Apparatus MD CDS 124
- Computer HP 98622 A
- Printer HP MD 2934A
- Software GC Workstation
- Software MS- MSD
- Controller HP7673A Sampler
- Pyrocell- Thermex RUSKA
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Reservoir Characterization and Modeling Laboratory (Duckering 408)
This laboratory is capable of conducting research in the areas of reservoir characterization, reservoir simulation, and computational modeling. The following facilities are available for computational research in this Laboratory.
Reservoir Modeling Facilities at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.
The major computing facilities at the Petroleum Development Laboratory (PDL) of the University of Alaska Fairbanks include Sun and SGI UNIX workstations and a network of personal computer workstations (PCs). . PDL has ECLIPSE 100/200 suites of software, state-of-the-art reservoir simulation software from Schlumberger running on various platforms—from PCs to the Supercomputer. In addition, for compositional and thermal modeling PDL has the software suites from the Computer Modeling Group. We also have access to the supercomputing facilities at the Arctic Region Supercomputing Center. The Arctic Region Supercomputing Center (ARSC) operates the following machines:
· CRAY T3E distributed-memory parallel processing supercomputer with 272 CPUs, 450-MHz processors. Their memory is distributed with 256 MB of memory at each processor, but its globally addressable space is 69.6 GB. The maximum number of processors that a single user job can use is 256, with 65.5 GB of associated memory and a peak performance potential of 230 Gigaflops.
· CRAY SV1e shared-memory vector parallel supercomputer. The SV1 has 32 vector processors with 32 GB (4 GW) of shared main memory. The SV1e provides peak potential parallel performance of 64 GFLOPS.
· Linux Cluster that is on loan from the Albuquerque High Performance Computing Center. Its primary purpose is to support training and research in multiprocessor computing.
· ImmersaDesk--a state-of-the-art data visualization and virtual reality tool. The ImmersaDesk allows interactive, real-time, visual exploration of user data.
ARSC also supports several Visualization Laboratories connected to the Cray supercomputers via local high-speed networks.
Furthermore, PDL has software for reservoir characterization and computer-aided well testing. Also, PDL has a substantial collection of well logs and well test data. Additional well logs can be obtained from the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, a State agency that has ongoing collaborative research projects with the Petroleum Development Laboratory, University of Alaska Fairbanks.
For more information please contact:
Petroleum Development Laboratory
P.O. Box 755880
Fairbanks, Alaska 99775-5880
