Dr. Neofytou Panagiotis Dr. Panagiotis Neofytou obtained his his PhD from the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology (UMIST) and joined the Environmental Research Laboratory of the National Centre for Scientific Research "Demokritos" in 2002 as a postdoctoral fellow working on atmospheric dispersion modelling. In 2007 he moved to the Thermal Hydraulics and Multiphase Flow Laboratory as a research associate. Over the past 15 years he has specialised in the development and application of advanced computational algorithms for non-Newtonian fluid dynamics. He has collaborated in several EU projects such as ROSE, QNET, OSCAR, REVEAL, HENVINET, NANEX, SCAFFOLD and MIFIS.
The validity of MIFIS method depends on the behavior of the seawater/oil/methane/hydrates mixture flowing upwards due to buoyancy in the large riser tube in the presence of large quantities of expanding gas and hydrates. Since execution of realistic blowout experiments are extremely costly, computer simulations offer a cost effective alternative and provide the possibility of insight on both the multi-phase plume and the surface interactions. The focus is especially on methane gas bubbles; their velocities and their dynamics, i.e. bubble growth and collapse. The simulations are performed using both in-house and commercial Computational Fluid Dynamics software and a feasibility and applicability study of the MIFIS system subsequent to the aforementioned results is also carried out.