Puneet Agarwal, Ph.D., P.E., BC.OE, F.ASCE, who has worked as an engineer, technology developer, and researcher for almost 17 years in the offshore oil and gas industry, has been named a fellow by the ASCE Board of Direction.
Agarwal’s primary focus is on risers and pipelines for deepwater oil & gas production. In addition, he has significant expertise in fixed-bottom and floating offshore wind energy.
He has also developed novel engineering solutions for high-impact business problems in the oil and gas industry. He co-led the development of the slugging fatigue analysis methodology for risers and validated by full-scale field measurements. Slugging has been added as a loading condition in the API riser standard that cites his paper for the methodology, and which is incorporated in the industry-leading riser software.
Another of his novel solutions for risers was the real-time fatigue monitoring system (RFMS), with which he developed the method to compute fatigue along the entire 2,000-meter length of a drilling riser by measurements of vibrations only at four to six locations. He was granted a U.S. patent for this work, which enabled drilling operations in very harsh environments.
Agarwal excels at combining advanced statistics and signal processing tools with system mechanics to extract relevant information for system health such as fatigue damage from the field measurements. He has conducted such assessments for many projects on risers, pipelines, and floating systems. He has developed new methods based on statistics and extreme value analysis for inspection and integrity assessment of onshore pipelines.
He is a recognized expert on vortex-induced-vibrations (VIV) or risers. He also initiated a separate JIP for validation of SHEAR7 with field data, which led to key improvements in practice.
Agarwal has also contributed to the offshore wind industry. He has been on the committee for the AWEA/ACP Recommended Practice for Offshore Wind. His doctoral research on load extrapolation has been included in the IEC 61400-1 and -3 standard for wind turbines. He was invited in 2012 by the US DOE for technical review of Advanced Technology Demonstration Projects. He advanced the state of the art of floating wind by developing technology for floating wind in 2000 m water depths, and for integration of variable wind power with back-up gas turbines to power offshore oil & gas platform while reducing emissions.
He enjoys mentoring younger engineers and has developed formal training courses in addition to providing on-the-job training to younger colleagues.
Agarwal has published extensively, with 51 articles to his credit which have been cited more than 800 times.
He is passionate about professional service and serves actively on the ASCE Program Committee of the Offshore Technology Conference, where he has led and chaired many sessions and keynotes.
Agarwal obtained his doctoral degree from the University of Texas at Austin, his master’s degree from the University of Connecticut, and a B.Tech. from Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, all degrees in civil engineering with a focus on structural mechanics and dynamics.
