The Gulf Oil Gusher is a disaster clear enough. However it is not a spill per se, BP has poked a hole into a pressurized fluid and it is gushing. This is more like a bleeding of a contained fluid. So once again "desperation could be the father of innovation" and my thoughts turn to the medical field with their balloon catheter technology.
It would seem to me that a ROV with a thin rigid catheter could insert that into the flow exit and then "inflate" it to stop the flow. I know its a mile under the water and "inflate" works far different with all that pressure, but still it seems that something like this could work. In the future perhaps there is a way to keep and inflatable "clot" in the pipe at all depths so that there could be a way to stop the flow.
The key is the ROV would not have to use torque, rather it would just have to hold the high pressure vessel to inflate the catheter.
Regardless I hope the people who really have to stop this are able to get all the ideas they can into their decision community because this is unlike anything we have done or see before.
posted by Exprexxo @ 11:23 PM
2 Comments:
If you haven't already read this or heard about the Innocentive crowdsourcing, you might be interested in submitting your idea through those channels:
http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/05/01/a-dumb-question-about-stanching-deep-oil/
Done, I have added my Cath-ey idea.
It was harder to submit that I would have liked but 20 minutes later, I hit the submit button. Thank you ever so much for connecting the social network. I love the concept of "Is There a ‘Feynman Fix’ for Leaking Well?". The fun part was you connected me to a NYT space that referred to the http://www.innocentive.com/ site. Sever degrees of reference!
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