Salvatore Salamone - USDOT Grant for Pipeline Safety Technology Research
The U.S. Department of Transportation awarded a $300,000 grant to Associate Professor Salvatore Salamone in the Department of Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering for his pipeline safety research.
The Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA) awarded the grant for Salamone’s research on pipeline corrosion, which could help prevent environmental disasters such as oil spills. Overall, PHMSA awarded a total of $3.8 million to 11 universities as part of its Competitive Academic Agreement Program (CAAP) for pipeline safety research and innovation.
Established in 2013, the CAAP has invested in research through cooperative agreement awards and is responsible for introducing science and engineering students to pipeline design, mitigation, and corrosion issues.
Salamone is a leading researcher in detecting and estimating pipeline corrosion using high-frequency waves. He says the research's success could reduce the large cost of pipeline maintenance and detect corrosion, one of the leading causes of pipeline failure.
The grant also covers graduate student funding for UT Austin studies. Postdoctoral researcher Arvin Ebrahimkhanlou said this funding has a direct impact on the students participating in the research.
“The award sponsors important research and also has a positive educational component,” Ebraimkhanlou said. “The people who are working on the project are able to continue their education and become experts in this area so that in the future they can be hired by the industries who are going to use and implement these types of technologies.”
“Through the PHMSA award, our team will be able to perform in-depth studies and experiments to develop a state-of-the-art structural health monitoring system for pipeline corrosion inspection,” said Stylianos Livadiotis, research assistant and civil engineering graduate student. “This system will have the key characteristics of being economical, automated and capable of diagnosing the early stages of corrosion damage.”
