The rise of the world’s population has increased the demand for energy such as electricity. However, the noxious gases emitted by the energies dominant today impose changing the strategies and search for clean energies. One of the important, cleaner and abundant resources is the natural gas (NG), which is largely transported in liquefied state (LNG). The transport needs to be secured against several parameters; here our focus is on corrosion, the principal cause of failure over the longer period. Due to corrosion dangerous accidents might occur, particularly in offshore, where the weather conditions make the corrosion proliferation accelerate. The aim of this project is to monitor corrosion and any resulting structural defects due to failure and fatigue of the secondary barrier of LNG tanks in ships, enhancing LNG storage and transport efficiency, safety and lifecycle. We propose developing surface acoustic wave (SAW) sensors for corrosion detection; they will be deployed around the tank and controlled wirelessly via a dedicated platform. The passive characteristic of SAW sensors makes them attractive, embedded antennas will allow energy-free communication in-site. Moreover, the continuous monitoring of the corrosion wirelessly will give important information about the tank’s conditions along its life-time without human intervention. This will increase safety of personnel and infrastructures drastically.
Prior to commencing his PhD at the University of Southampton Evangelos worked as a Project Engineer in Greece. He gained his degree from the National Technical University of Athens in 2016.
Themis is a Professor of Nanotechnology and Head of the Electronic Materials and Devices Research Group in the Zepler Institute, University of Southampton. He is recognized as a pioneer of metal-oxide Resistive Random-Access Memory technologies and is leading an interdisciplinary team comprising 20 researchers with expertise ranging from materials process development to electron devices and circuits and systems for embedded applications. He holds an EPSRC Fellowship, a Royal Society Industry Fellowship and is a Visiting Professor at the Department of Microelectronics and Nanoelectronics at Tsinghua University, CN and Honorary Fellow at Imperial College London. He previously held a Corrigan Fellowship in Nanoscale Technology and Science, funded by the Corrigan Foundation and LSI Inc., within the Centre for Bio-inspired Technology at Imperial College and a Lindemann Trust Visiting Fellowship in EECS UC Berkeley. Prof Prodromakis is a Fellow of the IET, Fellow of the Institute of Physics, Senior Member of the IEEE, and a Member of the INE, and also serves as member of the BioCAS, Nanoelectronics and Gigascale Systems and the Sensory Systems Technical Committees of the IEEE Circuits & Systems Society. He is also a member of the IEEE Nanotechnology Council, representing the CAS society, and Associate Editor for Nature's Scientific Reports, IEEE Sensors and the Frontiers in Neuromorphic Engineering. Prof Prodromakis is also the Director of the Lloyds Register Foundation International Consortium for Nanotechnology, a global initiative for building a safer world with nanotechnologies. His contributions on electron devices were recognised by his appointment as a member of the Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC) Emerging Research Devices working group that produces the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors (ITRS). In 2015, Prof Prodromakis established ArC Instruments Ltd, a start-up that delivers high-performance testing infrastructure for automating characterisation of novel nanodevices. His background is in Electron Devices and nanofabrication techniques, with his research being focused on bio-inspired devices for advanced computing architectures and biomedical applications
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