Engineering Hero: Under the Sea — Simulating Sustainable Energy Solutions
November 22, 2023
Sponsored Video
In this fifth installment of Engineering Heroes, sponsored by Wind River, we’d like to introduce you to Anton Riström, a Department Manager at Aker Solutions, an engineering company that focuses on building infrastructure for renewable energy solutions.
With the ever-present and growing threat of climate change, sustainability is a hot button topic and has been for years now — but advancements in technological capabilities are allowing innovators to finding more and more creative sustainable energy solutions. One such method you may not be familiar with is subsea compression, which is a way to draw naturally occurring gas out from the seabed.
Compressors are placed on the ocean floor to increase pressure, which compromises the gas to allow it to flow up into pipes with less resistance. This compression process ends up generating a lot of heat, so the gas also needs to be passed through building-sized cooling chambers, and as I’m sure you can imagine, it would be difficult to develop and test such a large system at the bottom of the ocean.
Luckily, we have people like Anton Riström, an expert in using computational fluid dynamics in simulation technologies that helped greatly in projects like the 2015 Åsgard Subsea Compression Project, where he and a team at Aker Solutions used that tech to develop digital twins of 17-meter-tall cooling chambers.
But you can hear directly from Anton in the video above, and stay tuned for more Engineering Heroes content!
Editor's Note: For more Engineering Hero content, check out the links below.
Daire McNamara, Director and Firmware Engineer, Emdalo Technologies:
Nandini Kappiah, Senior Director of Software Engineering, Google:
Valentyn Hlukhotskyy, Senior Java Software Engineer, Euristiq:
Levi Zima, RF Microwave Engineer:
Samer Mabrouk, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Georgia Institute of Technology:
