Murari Singh - Expanders for Oil and Gas Operations: Design, Applications, and Troubleshooting

Murari P. Singh, PhD, is the president of Safe Technical Solutions, Inc. (SAFETSOL). He has been involved in the design, development, and analysis of industrial turbomachinery for more than 30 years with Turbodyne Corporation, Dresser Industries, Dresser Rand Company, GE CONMEC, and most recently, GE Oil & Gas as consulting engineer. Dr. Singh has extensive knowledge and experience with fatigue and fracture mechanics, stress and vibration structures, reliability, life analysis, and probabilistic analysis. His practical application experience features a variety of rotating equipment, including CAES, warm gas and FCC expanders, steam turbines, and centrifugal compressors. He developed the widely used SAFE diagram for reliable evaluation of turbine blades. Most recently, Dr. Singh has been involved in developing and teaching applications of lifting strategy for many mechanical components. This includes subjects dealing with HCF, LCF, creep, and fracture mechanics. He has authored many technical papers, is coauthor of Steam Turbines: Design, Application, and Reratingand co-author of Blade Design and Analysis.

Michael J. Drosjackjoined Shell Oil in 1975 as a member of the central Machinery Engineer Department in Houston, Texas. He retired from Shell in 2009 and since then has participated as a private machinery consultant in his company, Drosjack Consulting, LLC.

Through a variety of assignments over his Shell career, he was responsible for providing technical support for rotating and reciprocating machinery to Shell operations both Upstream and Downstream primarily in the United States but with international responsibilities. He was chair of the Shell US Machinery Technical Network for many years. He had assignments on projects involving specification, evaluation, installation, and start-up of machinery along with extensive field troubleshooting and failure analysis of machinery. An area of specialization was rotor dynamics. He was the FCC Hot Gas Expander subject matter expert for the Americas. Toward the end of his career with Shell, he spent considerable time on technology development projects, including evaluation and design of novel machinery for special applications.

Dr. Drosjack received his BS in mechanical engineering from Carnegie Mellon University. He received his MS and PhD degrees from The Ohio State University. Dr. Drosjack is a member of ASME and the Vibration Institute and is a registered Professional Engineer in the state of Texas. He has been a member of the Texas A&M Turbomachinery Symposium Advisory Committee since 1986 and currently holds emeritus status on the TAC. He was a cofounder of the Machinery Subcommittee of the Ethylene Producers Committee and vice chairman of the API 684 Task Force on Rotor Dynamics, having served on a number of task forces of the Subcommittee of Mechanical Equipment of API. He has authored numerous papers on turbomachinery issues.

David H. Lindenis the president of D. H. Linden Associates, Inc. He has been involved in the design, development, manufacture, installation, and operation of turbomachinery for more than 40 years. Mr. Linden has worked for a number of original equipment manufacturers including Conmec Inc., Dresser Rand Co., General Electric Co., Ingersoll Rand Co., and Westinghouse Electric Corporation. Mr. Linden is recognized as a renowned expert in the area of Hot Gas Expanders and industrial axial flow compressors. He specializes in the areas of turbomachinery design and reliability. He has authored or coauthored 14 technical papers for various technical forums including the ASME and Turbomachinery Symposiums. Mr. Linden is a member of ASME, ASTM, NACE, and is a contributor to the API 687 Rotor Repair subcommittee. Mr. Linden has a BSME from Rutgers UniversityCollege of Engineering.