Sharif Digital Repository

Microbial Enhanced Oil Recovery (MEOR) as a tertiary process employs microorganisms and their metabolites to reduce the residual oil saturation of the reservoir mainly through interfacial tension (IFT) reduction and wettability alteration. In spite of its great potential and the mentioned advantages, application of MEOR has been limited because of the lack of practical convincing experimental results. In this study, the effects of MEOR process on wettability changes and the reduction of residual oil saturation have been examined by providing microscopic visualization of two phase flow in transparent glass micromodels. Biosurfactant producing bacterial strain (Enterobacter cloacae) was... 

Fungal delignification can be considered as a feasible process to pre-treat lignocellulosic biomass in biofuel production, if its performance is improved in terms of efficiency thorough a few modifications. In this study, Trichoderma viride was utilized to investigate the effect of wet-milling, addition of surfactant (Tween 80) and optimization of operating factors such as temperature, biomass to liquid medium ratio and glucose concentration on biodelignification of rice straw. Next, the enzymatic hydrolysis of pretreated biomass was studied at various pretreatment times. Results revealed that the wet milling and addition of surfactant increases the lignin removal about 15% and 11%,... 

Microbial enhanced oil recovery (MEOR) is receiving renewed interest worldwide in recent years as a viable method while not damaging the reservoir is proven to be remarkably effective, however to some extent costly. This method is based on microorganisms' activities to reduce residual oil of reservoirs, which is dependent on behavior of inherent microorganisms or injection of bioproduct of external microorganisms. In this work, five bacterial species were taken from MIS crude oil that is one of the aging Persian fractured reservoirs. These microorganisms are substantially strong in increasing oil recovery especially by reducing IFT and other MEOR mechanisms such as change of wettability of... 

Microbial EOR (MEOR) is receiving renewed interest worldwide. The method is based on microorganisms' activities to reduce residual oil of reservoirs, which is dependent on behavior of inherent microorganisms or injection of bioproduct of external microorganisms. Five bacterial species were taken from MIS crude oil that is one of the aging Persian fractured reservoirs. Visualization experiments were carried out to examine the behavior of MEOR in micromodels designed to resemble the fractured system: static and dynamic. A new surface sample of the MIS oil was taken at the well head and physical specifications were measured at the lab. This was fairly light oil with API gravity of 42.5. The... 

The power law logistic model was utilized to investigate the growth of a hydrocarbon assimilating bacterium on a water-insoluble substrate. To achieve this end, population dynamics of Bacillus licheniformis MS3 in a medium containing n-decane as the sole carbon source was monitored for 30 h. Different initial biosurfactant concentrations and shaking rates were employed to examine the role of mass transfer in the cell growth and the consequent hydrocarbon biodegradation. The amount of n-decane degraded in the system was detected by gas chromatography at the end of the incubation period. The results revealed that when mass transfer limitations were lessened through addition of an initial... 

To obtain potentially applicable microorganisms to an effective in situ microbial enhanced oil recovery operation, bacteria that were compatible with the harsh conditions of a petroleum reservoir were isolated from a crude oil sample. The application of an oil spreading technique showed that all of the isolates were capable of producing biosurfactants from both the glucose and crude oil as carbon sources. The secreted biosurfactants could at least reduce the surface tension 20 mN/m and for one of the isolates; the surface tension value dropped below 40 mN/m. In addition, the contact angle measurements revealed that the produced biosurfactants could effectively alter the wettability of the... 

To describe immobilized cells in porous microcapsule membranes with straight pores, a novel model called corrugated parallel bundle model (CPBM) was utilized. In this model, a network was developed with 10 main pores each composing 10 pore elements. Cell growth kinetic in the network was examined using non-structural models. Effectiveness factor and pore plugging time were calculated by solving reaction-diffusion equation set via finite difference method. The findings revealed that diffusion coefficient for lower order reactions will create a lesser impact on the reduction of effectiveness factor. These findings also indicated that the use of such supporting carrier for cell immobilization... 

Rock samples from the Asmary outcrop formation of the Ahwaz oil rich zone with a porosity of 16% and permeability of 1 md and MIS crude oil with an API value of 42.5 and moderate asphaltene content of 3%, were used to study the effect of the incubation time and flow rate of the displacing fluid in MEOR operations. Five species of rod shaped, gram positive, thermophile and facultative bacteria were isolated and purified from the crude. Due to the high sweep efficiency prevailing in the core flooding system, the effect of the displacing brine flow rate on the oil recovery efficiency was found not to be significant. On the other hand, a 100% increase in incubation time from 7 to 14 days... 

An electroflotation technique was utilized to reclaim the surfactant molecules from oil-in-water emulsions. A two-staged separation mechanism was suggested to describe the process. The surfactant recovery efficiencies were higher than 70% after 30 min treatment. The method could be an effective process in recycling surfactants from the emulsions existing in industrial wastes. This is an abstract of a paper presented at the 8th World Congress of Chemical Engineering (Montreal, Quebec, Canada 8/23-27/2009)  

Mechanical fracture is a common cause of failure for 3-unit dental bridges, particularly, the all-ceramic structures. The purpose of the present study was to evaluate the effect of convergence angles of the abutments on the distribution of the mechanical stresses, within the prosthesis and at the restoration-abutments interface of a 3-unit all-ceramic bridge. The 3-D geometrical data of the second premolar and first and second molar teeth were obtained using ATOS scanner system and utilized for reconstruction of a surface model of the 3-unit bridge in I-Deas as solid modeler software. This was then transferred to MSC/Nastran software for mesh generation and finite element analysis. Two FE... 

The physical properties and chemical structure of a new biosurfactant (licheniformin) produced by Bacillus licheniformis MS3 were investigated. The purified biosurfactant was identified as a lipopeptide with amino acid sequence of Gly, Ala, Val, Asp, Ser, Gly, Tyr and a lactone linkage between the carboxyl group of Aspargine and hydroxyl group of Tyrosine residue. The fatty acid moiety was attached to N-terminal amino acid residue through an amide bond. The purified licheniformin could lower the surface tension of water from 72 to 38 mN/m at concentrations higher than 15 μg/mL and its relative emulsion volume (EV%) was equal to 36%. It also showed stable surface activity over a wide range of... 

Simultaneous extraction of zinc and cadmium by a mixture of di-2-ethyl hexyl phosphoric acid (DEHPA) and mono-2-ethyl hexyl phosphoric acid (MEHPA), and the synergistic effect of MEHPA on co-extraction of zinc and cadmium with DEHPA have been investigated. It was shown that the extraction of zinc and cadmium by DEHPA and/or MEHPA can be increased by an increase of pH. The results also illustrate that the pH0.5 of zinc, by increase in MEHPA from 0.1 to 8 vol%, did not vary significantly while that of cadmium varies from 0.63 to 2.4. In other words MEHPA prevents selective extraction of zinc from aqueous media containing both zinc and cadmium. Studies on the selective separation parameter... 

The present work is concerned with the steady incompressible flow through a parallel plate channel with stretching walls under an externally applied magnetic field. The governing continuity and Navier-Stokes equations are reduced to a fourth order nonlinear differential equation by using vorticity definition and similarity solution transformation. The obtained equations are solved by applying the analytical homotopy perturbation method (HPM). The method is called order of magnitude suggested for simplifying series solution to finite expression that is useful in engineering problems. The results are verified by comparing with numerical solutions and demonstrate a good accuracy of the obtained... 

In the last decade, many potent analytical methods have been utilized to find the approximate solution of nonlinear differential equations. Some of these methods are energy balance method (EBM), homotopy perturbation method (HPM), variational iteration method (VIM), amplitude frequency formulation (AFF), and max-min approach (MMA). Besides the methods mentioned above, the Akbari-Ganji method (AGM) is a highly efficient analytical method to solve a wide range of nonlinear equations, including heat transfer, mass transfer, and vibration problems. In this study, it was constructed the approximate analytic solution for movement of two mechanical oscillators by employing the AGM. In the derived... 

At SCN 2018, Fiore and Pagnin proposed a generic compiler (called “Matrioska”) allowing to transform sufficiently expressive single-key homomorphic signatures (SKHSs) into multi-key homomorphic signatures (MKHSs) under falsifiable assumptions in the standard model. Matrioska is designed for homomorphic signatures that support programs represented as circuits. The MKHS schemes obtained through Matrioska support the evaluation and verification of arbitrary circuits over data signed from multiple users, but they require the underlying SKHS scheme to work with circuits whose size is exponential in the number of users, and thus can only support a constant number of users. In this work, we propose... 

The ride comfort of high-speed trains passing over railway bridges is studied in this paper. A parametric study is carried out using a time domain model. The effects of some design parameters are investigated such as damping and stiffness of the suspension system and also ballast stiffness. The influence of the track irregularity and train speed on two comfort indicators, namely Sperling's comfort index and the maximum acceleration level are also studied. Two types of railway bridges, a simple girder and an elastically supported bridge are considered. Timoshenko beam theory is used for modelling the rail and bridge and two layers of parallel damped springs in conjunction with a layer of mass...