Sharif Digital Repository

In this study, the essential oil of aerial parts species of a plant called Spearmint was extracted by CO 2 to optimize the results of the supercritical extraction process. In order to achieve maximum total yield extraction and SF-CO 2 concentration, tests were done in a laboratorial pilot considering the Taguchi method under following condition: pressure. 90,100,140,170 bar, temperature. of 35, 40, 45, 50 °C, mean particles size: 250,500,710,1000 μm, flow rate 1,3,5,8 ml/s and dynamic time 30,50,90,120 min. The optimizing conditions for SCE and SF-CO 2 concentration are: 90 bar, 45 °C, 500 μm, 5 ml/s, 120 min and 90 bar, 35 °C, 250 μm, 1 ml/s, 30 min. SCE total yield and CO 2 concentration... 

Extraction of the essential oil from a medicinal plant called Dracocephalum kotschyi Boiss was performed by green technology of supercritical carbon dioxide (SC-CO2) extraction. A Taguchi orthogonal array design with an OA16 (45) matrix was used to evaluate the effects of five extraction variables: pressure of 150-310bar, temperature of 40-60°C, average particle size of 250-1000μm, CO2 flow rate of 2-10ml/s and dynamic extraction time of 30-100min. The optimal conditions to obtain the maximum extraction yield were at 240bar, 60°C, 500μm, 10ml/s and 100min. The extraction yield under the above conditions was 2.72% (w/w) which is more than two times the maximum extraction yield that has been... 

In order to investigate the feasibility and effects of core permeability on capillary imbibition recoverable oil from carbonate cores, some laboratory tests were carried out at the EOR research laboratories of Sharif University, Iran. Outcrop rocks with different permeabilities were taken away from a recognized outcrop and used in these experiments. Special core analysis tests were run on two core samples to find out relative permeability and end point saturations. Wellhead separator oil and gas samples were collected and recombined to a reservoir gas - oil ratio. A core flooding system with a capability of free and forced imbibition testing was designed and installed. A number of free and... 

Supercritical fluid extraction is a new technology that could be effectively used to treat oil-contaminated drill cuttings generated during drilling for oil and gas. In this work, the solubility of oil-contaminated drill cuttings in supercritical carbon dioxide is obtained by an experimental flow type apparatus. The solubility was measured at 200 bar pressure, over a temperature range of 55-79.5°C. The measured solubility and experimental data for oil in drill cuttings were correlated using the PC-SAFT, PR and SRK EOS models, without any adjustable parameters. Average absolute derivations of less than 15.1 %, 98.7 %, and 99.3 % are achieved between predicted and experimental values for the... 

An experimental flow-type apparatus has been tested for the separation of phenanthrene from a mixture of solids (phenanthrene, anthracene, and carbazole) and also from anthracene oil of the Isfahan Coal Tar Refining Company based on retrograde crystallization phenomena in supercritical carbon dioxide. The results show that by exploiting the crossover effect it is possible to obtain (82 and 24) mass % of phenanthrene from the solid mixture and anthracene oil, respectively, with a single temperature cycle  

Supercritical fluid extraction (SFE) is a relatively new separation technique that has received much attention in recent years. This process is an alternative to distillation or liquid extraction. Its main advantage over the conventional ones is that the dissolved extract may be completely separated from the supercritical fluid simply by decreasing the pressure. In recent years considerable effort has been devoted to the measurement of equilibrium solubility data for solids in supercritical fluids. A coal tar distillate, anthracene oil, which contains 34.46 mass-% phenanthrene, 33.8 mass-% anthracene, 13.89 mass-% carbazole and other impurities, was used as the model mixture. In this study,... 

Stress variations around wellbores and in the reservoirs are of much interest in subsequent drilling operations, future production, and petroleum reservoir development. Stress variations induced by in situ stresses, pore pressure, and temperature changes during drilling operations may lead to various modes of instabilities in forms of induced fractures and borehole breakouts. Previous studies of thermally induced stresses were primarily based on either assumptions of heat conduction through rock matrix or heat convection, in this case, without considering the effect of solid grain thermal conductivity. To analyze wellbore stability, in the present work, a thermo-poro-mechanical model that is... 

Poly(vinyl alcohol)-polyethylene glycol, PVA-PEG, blended membrane were prepared using supercritical fluid assisted phase-inversion method, in which scCO2 was used as the anti-solvent. Poly(vinyl alcohol) was utilized as the main polymer, polyethylene glycol as the additive, and dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO) as the solvent of these polymers. Taguchi method was used to investigate the effect of some operating parameters on the morphology of the membranes. The L16 orthogonal array was selected under the following conditions: pressure (100, 135, 165 and 200 bar), temperature (40, 45, 50 and 55°C) and PEG weight percent (0, 0.33, 0.66, and 1%). Total polymer concentration of solutions in all... 

Permeability variations in reservoirs and around boreholes are of great interest in petroleum engineering due to the fact that they can significantly affect reserve estimates, reservoir development, well production or injection rate, and the likely success of remedial actions of near-wellbore damage. A fully coupled transient thermo-poroelastic concept with and without rock mechanical damage models is employed to evaluate stress distribution and permeability variation around the boreholes and breakouts. The anisotropy concept is applied to permeability, rock modulus, and uniaxial compressive strength using Weibull distribution. The Mogi–Coulomb failure criterion is employed to model breakout... 

In this work, the selectivity coefficients of ionic liquids in liquid-liquid systems were correlated and predicted by the NRTL, UNIQUAC, and Wilson-NRF Gibbs free energy models and also by an artificial neural network system. The three thermodynamic models need six binary interaction parameters between solvent(1)-solvent(2), solvent(1)-ionic liquid, and solvent(2)-ionic liquid pairs in obtaining the selectivity of ionic liquid in liquid-liquid systems. Also, the selectivity coefficients of ionic liquids were modeled using an artificial neural network system. In the proposed neural network system, temperature, molecular weight of ionic liquid, molecular weight of solvents, and mole fractions... 

The coupling of rock and thermal stresses along with fluid pressure are particularly important in fractured rock masses, since stress-induced changes in permeability can be large and irreversible under perturbations resulting from various natural and induced activities. A new method is presented to model fracture permeability changes during drilling in fractured rocks. The approach includes finite element method (FEM) for fully coupled thermo-poroelastic analysis of stress distribution around borehole and displacement discontinuity method (DDM) to model fracture deformation. Three cases of overbalanced, underbalanced, and balanced drilling fluid pressure conditions are employed. The... 

The wellbore represents one of the most crucial components in the hydrocarbon and geothermal reservoir system, as it is the sole conduit to the reservoir for fluid production or injection. Therefore, predicting and controlling of the permeability variations close to the wellbore has been one of the most challenging issues in geothermal and petroleum reservoir systems. A new method is presented to model fracture permeability changes during drilling in fractured rocks. The approach includes finite element method (FEM) for fully coupled thermo-poroelastic analysis of stress distribution around borehole and displacement discontinuity method (DDM) to model fracture deformation. Four models of... 

Adsorption ability of prepared magnetic nanoparticles supported on activated carbon (AC-MNPs) was evaluated to synthesize an efficient and a low cost adsorbent for removal of Pb(II) and Cr(VI) ions from single and binary component aqueous solutions in the presence of salinity. Magnetic adsorbent was prepared by co-precipitation over activated carbon derived from almond shell by physical activation method. AC-MNPs was modified by oxygen containing functional groups to enhance the adsorption capacity of adsorbent. XRD, XPS, BET, Boehm, TEM, FT-IR, DLS and XRF were used to characterize the AC@Fe3O4@SiO2-NH2-COOH. Characterization analyses indicated the high dispersion of Fe3O4 crystallites on... 

This paper deals with the modeling and simulation of binary liquid-phase adsorption of methyl mercaptan and hydrogen sulfide from a liquid butane stream by zeolite molecular sieve 13X in a fixed bed. The model equations account for the effect of axial dispersion and the inter- and intraparticle, mass-transfer resistances at isothermal operating conditions. Orthogonal collocation and Gill's fourth-order Runge-Kutta methods were used to solve the dimensionless general forms of the 4N-eoupled ordinary differential equations for simultaneous adsorption of the solutes by the adsorbent in a fixed bed. The model predictions were compared to the commercial-scale plant data of an Iranian... 

This study compares the performance of three different approaches to modeling namely the classical pore-blocking models, artificial neural networks (ANN) and the novel genetic programming (GP) approach. Among the available models proposed by Hermia, standard pore-blocking and cake filtration models were opted because of their better fitness with experimental measurements. A feedforward backpropagation network using Bayesian Regulation as well as Levenberg-Marquardt training methods was developed based on the experimental results. Network inputs include the controlling parameters of permeate flux namely: temperature, transmembrane pressure, crossflow velocity, pH, and filtration time. The...