Sharif Digital Repository

Although Multi-Walled Carbon NanoTubes (MWCNTs) are found to influence the rheological behavior of drilling fluids, there are yet some controversies regarding their performance towards reducing formation damage induced by the invasion of water-based drilling fluids (WBFs). To address this important question, we synthesized novel nanocomposite materials via modifying the MWCNT via varying the proportion of carboxylated MWCNTs to PolyVinyl Alcohol (PVA). These nanocomposites were then used to make nano-based drilling-fluids (NDFs). The performance of the NDFs was evaluated by a set of rheological behavior tests, filtration experiments, and core-scale mud flow tests. To distinguish between the... 

Understanding the chemistry of sandstone acidizing is important in designing an effective treatment for subsurface rock formations. The complex chemistry of sandstone systems leads to the precipitation of minerals that contribute to formation damage. Thus, monitoring the concentration and location of precipitates is necessary. In this work, a continuum-scale sequential implicit LEA/PLEA reactive transport model is developed and programmed through coupling OpenFOAM and Reaktoro to improve the model prediction. The proposed LEA/PLEA models are compared for core acidizing simulations at relatively high and low Damköhler numbers. We found that the common assumption of kinetically-controlled flow... 

The present research is performed to calculate the natural frequencies, loss factors, and associated mode shapes of a sandwich cylinder with moderately thick functionally graded (FG) face sheets and an electrorheological (ER) fluid core. Each face sheet is assumed to be made of FG materials, and its displacement field is estimated based on the first-order shear deformation theory, like the ER constrained layer. A suitable displacement continuity condition is considered between layers. The ER fluid used in the central middle is analyzed in the pre-yield area and considered electric field dependent. Hamilton's principle is used to acquire the motion equations related to each layer and... 

Three-dimensional biocompatible porous structures can be fabricated using different methods. However, the biological and mechanical behaviors of scaffolds are the center of focus in bone tissue engineering. In this study, tricalcium phosphate scaffolds with similar porosity contents but different pore morphologies were fabricated using two different techniques, namely, the replica method and the pore-forming agent method. The samples fabricated using the pore-forming agent showed more than two times higher compressive and bending strengths and more than three times higher compressive moduli. Furthermore, a thin layer of agarose coating improved the compressive and bending strength of both... 

A Ground Source Heat Pump (GSHP) is a renewable energy-based HVAC system that extracts or supplies heat from/to the ground via a Ground Heat Exchanger (GHE). One of the most commonly used types of GHE in GSHP systems is the energy pile. In this realm, the GSHP system with a triple helix energy pile has become the focus of attention. To this aim, a comprehensive three-dimensional transient Computational Fluid Dynamics model of the energy pile with triple helix GHE and the surrounding soil is developed. The effect of several parameters, including helix pitch, helix diameter and pipe diameter, on the thermal performance of the system, is investigated. Simulated cases are chosen using the design... 

The present study is set out to systematically investigate the combined impact of operational, geometrical, and model uncertainties on the hemodynamics and performance characteristics in the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) benchmark centrifugal blood pump. Non-intrusive Polynomial Chaos Expansion (NIPCE) has been utilized to propagate the uncertainty of 12 random input variables in the flow field and the performance characteristics of the blood pump at three working conditions. The global sensitivity of the Quantities of Interest (QoI) to the uncertain input parameters was measured through the Sobol’ indices. The Multiple Reference Frames (MRF) approach and the SST k−ω turbulence... 

Natural gas hydrate, a crystalline solid existing under high-pressure and low-temperature conditions, has been regarded as a potential alternative energy resource. It is globally widespread and occurs mainly inside the pores of deepwater sediments and sediments under permafrost area. Hydrate production via well depressurization is deemed well-suited to existing technology, in which the pore pressure is lowered, the natural gas hydrate is dissociated into water and gas, and the water and gas are produced from well. This method triggers multiphysics processes such as fluid flow, heat transfer, energy adsorption, chemical reaction and sediment deformation, all of which are dependent on the... 

An enhancement in heat transfer due to nanofluids is essentially required in various thermal systems. Hybrid nanofluids possess high thermal conductivity and, have ability to embellish and enhance the thermal strength of common fluids. Our concern in this paper is to examine the innovative attributes of hybrid nanofluids like Manganese zinc ferrite (MnZnFe2O4) and Nickel zinc ferrite (NiZnFe2O4) in the bio-convective flow of motile gyrotactic microorganisms subject to Darcy Forchheimer medium. The effect of activation energy has also been taken into account. Mathematical treatment is carried out via MATLAB software. The use of MnZnFe2O4 - NiZnFe2O4/H2O exhibits improved thermal... 

Achieving high efficiency and throughput in droplet-based mixing over a small characteristic length, such as microfluidic channels, is one of the crucial parameters in Lab-on-a-Chip (LOC) applications. One solution to achieve efficient mixing is to use active mixers in which an external power source is utilized to mix two fluids. One of these active methods is magnetic micromixers using ferrofluid. In this technique, magnetic nanoparticles are used to make one phase responsive to magnetic force, and then by applying a magnetic field, two fluid phases, one of which is magneto-responsive, will sufficiently mix. In this study, we investigated the effect of the magnetic field’s characteristics... 

It has always been a human challenge to inspire natural configurations and phenomena and benefit from their merits in improving the performances of man-made proposed aero/hydro vehicles. For example, the manta rays are known for their great swimming performances. To design and fabricate an underwater robot based on the manta ray geometry and its kinematic characteristics, it is important to initially study its hydrodynamic behavior and possibly arrive at some key design parameters, which can remarkably help to figure out an optimum geometry with high swimming performances. The main objective of this study is to focus on the merits of gliding motion inspired by the manta ray fish considering... 

A highly controllable, green, and rapid strategy is demonstrated for fabricating of highly sensitive non-enzymatic glucose sensing platforms. Carbon nanohorns (CNHs) were decorated onto the screen-printed electrodes. Binary nickel-cobalt sulfide (NiCo-S) nanosheets (NSs) were then deposited on CNH-casted electrodes by a facile and scalable method. Following detailed structural characterization and the electrocatalytic activity of the fabricated NiCo-S/CNH electrodes towards electro-oxidation of glucose was examined in detail. The proposed electrodes operated within two distinct linear dynamic ranges of 0.001- 0.330 mM and 0.330 - 4.53 mM with sensitivities of 1842 µA.mM−1.cm−2 and 854... 

In the present study, the solubility of paracetamol in supercritical CO2 is measured at temperatures between 311 and 358 K and pressures between 95 and 265 bar. It was shown that the solubility of paracetamol through a static solubility measurement method was between 0.3055 × 10−6 to 16.3582 × 10−6 based on mole fraction. The obtained experimental solubility data revealed the direct effect of pressure on the paracetamol experimental data, while the temperature has a dual effect of both increasing and decreasing effect considering the shifting point known as crossover pressure which was measured to be around 110 bar for paracetamol. Besides, two theoretical approaches were applied to predict... 

Sporosarcina pasteurii is a well-known ureolytic bacteria that promotes the microbially induced calcite precipitation (MICP) process for several environmental and engineering purposes. In our work, for the first time, MICP has been implemented to form pure, porous calcite structures. The maximum urease activity of S. pasteurii was 1.91 mM urea hydrolyzed min−1 at the late-exponentially phase. A reactor has been designed to achieve semi-continuous treatments, and reagents were introduced to it by a peristaltic pump. A new alternating injection pattern was adopted to obtain well-distributed precipitation. SEM images of treated structures indicated the shapes of CaCO3 crystals at a microscale... 

In this paper, a numerical model is developed for the assessment of carbon dioxide transport through naturally fractured cap-rocks during CO2 sequestration in underground aquifers. The cap-rock contains two types of fracture with different length scales: micro-cracks (fissures) and macro-cracks (faults). The effect of micro-cracks is incorporated implicitly by modifying the intrinsic permeability tensor of porous matrix, while the macro-cracks are modeled explicitly using the extended finite element method (X-FEM). The fractured porous medium is decomposed into the porous matrix and fracture domain, which are occupied with two immiscible fluid phases, water and CO2. The flow inside the... 

In drilling industry, energy consumption counts from 20 to 40 percent of total costs. Enhanced water-based mud (WBM) drilling fluids with nanoparticles can save energy in drilling processes. An in-house Taylor-Couette flow system (TCS) was developed at Australian University (AU) to study WBM enhanced by Al2O3, SiO2, and TiO2 nanoparticles. The TCS is really a practical tool to help well drillers with a rough idea of viscosity when nanoparticles are added. The TCS for sure cannot substitute advanced rheometry. The goal of the present experiment is to produce a rough estimate in field operation. Experimental results were examined with several rheology models in our previous publications. In... 

Despite the fact that solid–liquid phase change materials (PCMs) have various applications in thermal energy storage systems, the low solidification rate of PCMs, which is due to the low thermal conductivity has limited the range of applications of PCMs. One of the methods of increasing the solidification rate of PCMs is using a boiling fluid as an intermediary between the solid–liquid PCM and the condenser to prevent the direct contact between the phase change material and the condenser tubes, this method is also known as the intermediate boiling fluid (IBF) method. The IBF method has been shown to significantly increase the solidification rate (2 orders of magnitude). In this study, the... 

Multiphase flow is a challenging area of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) due to their potential large topological change and close coupling between the interface and fluid flow solvers. As such, Lagrangian meshless methods are very well suited for solving such problems. In this paper, we present a new fully explicit incompressible Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics approach (EISPH) for solving multiphase flow problems. Assuming that the change in pressure between consecutive time-steps is small, due to small time steps in explicit solvers, an approximation of the pressure for following time-steps is derived. To verify the proposed method, several test cases including both single-phase and... 

A nonlinear fluid–structure interaction (FSI) model is presented for nonlinear vibration analysis of sandwich cylindrical shells subjected to an external compressible flow by considering the curvature nonlinearity in impermeability condition and bending. The sandwich shells are made of two face sheets and a central core of advanced materials including functionally graded (FG), metal foam, and anisogrid lattice composite. Based on the Kirchhoff–love hypotheses with the geometric nonlinearities in the normal strain and curvature of mid-surface, one decoupled nonlinear integral–differential equation is obtained for axisymmetric bending vibration of sandwich cylindrical shells. For the first... 

The slow kinetics of wettability alteration toward a more water-wetting state by low-salinity waterflooding (LSWF) in oil-brine-rock (OBR) systems is conjectured to be pertinent to the electrokinetic phenomena in the thin brine film. We hypothesize that the nanoscale physicochemical heterogeneities such as surface roughness and surface charge heterogeneity at the rock/brine interface control further the dynamics of electrodiffusion and electrostatic disjoining pressure (Πel), thus the time-scale and the magnitude of the low salinity effect (LSE). In this regard, film-scale computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations were performed. The coupled Poisson-Nernst-Planck (PNP) equations were... 

This work studies the natural frequencies and modes of liquid sloshing in a rectangular 3D tank with the slotted baffles in middle. A new vibrational model incorporating the pressure difference between the two sides of the baffle, using a transmission function in Laplace space is presented. To this end, a part of the baffle that includes the wall and the slot is modeled in Fluent software, to express this pressure difference as a function of the fluid velocity passing through the baffle. Then, using the boundary element method, and boundary conditions, the equations of the fluid domain are developed. In this research, the rigid baffle is surrounded by a three-dimensional irrotational...