Sharif Digital Repository

The aim of the present study is to provide an Atlas of IRAN Offshore Renewable Energy Resources (hereafter called 'the Atlas') to map out wave and tidal resources at a national scale, extending over the area of the Persian Gulf and Sea of Oman. Such an Atlas can provide necessary tools to identify the areas with greatest resource potential and within reach of present technology development. To estimate available tidal energy resources at the site, a two-dimensional tidally driven hydrodynamic numerical model of Persian Gulf was developed using the hydrodynamic model in the MIKE 21 Flow Model (MIKE 21HD), with validation using tidal elevation measurements and tidal stream diamonds from... 

The Persian Gulf is one of the aquatic ecosystems which has recently been faced with different pollutions. Cooling water discharges due to various industries such as power plants can cause important disorders on the present ecosystem balance and on aquatic creatures because of their high temperature. Thermal pollution leads to their migration, creates a potential for new coming species which in turn can thoroughly change the marine ecosystem feature. In this research, thermal pollution due to the Bandar Abbas Thermal Power Plant (BATP) development plan was modeled using MIKE21 software. In order to avoid a decrease in the power plant efficiency in the development plan, the distance between... 

The Persian Gulf is one of the aquatic ecosystems which has recently faced with different pollutions. Cooling water discharges due to various industries such as power plants can cause important disorders on present ecosystem balance because of its high temperature. Obviously, due to thermal pollution, a great number of aquatic creatures face with a new situation that they can not tolerate. Thermal pollution leads to their migration, creates a potential for new coming species which in turn can thoroughly change the marine ecosystem feature. The other impacts of this phenomenon are: disorders in reproduction, nourishment and other biological habits. In this research, thermal pollution due to... 

Persian Gulf is a semi-enclosed highly saline reverse estuary that is exposed to the risk of oil spills in offshore oil and gas activities. In the early 2000s, a specific version of NOAA's Trajectory Analysis Planner (TAP II) was developed for Persian Gulf to assist regional organizations in preparing oil spill contingency plans. In this research, a new stochastic model is developed to cover the limitations of TAP II. The new model is based on an advanced trajectory model, which is now linked with high resolution spatiotemporal data of the wind and sea current. In a case study, the developed model is compared with TAP II, and evaluated by multiple tests designed for analysis of uncertainty,... 

Different causes lead to accidental oil spills from fixed and mobile sources in the marine environment. Therefore, it is essential to have a systematic plan for mitigating oil spill consequences. In this research, a general DSS is proposed for passive and active response planning in Persian Gulf, before and after a spill. The DSS is based on NOAA's advanced oil spill model (GNOME), which is now linked with credible met-ocean datasets of CMEMS and ECMWF. The developed open-source tool converts the results of the Lagrangian oil spill model to quantitative parameters such as mean concentration and time of impact of oil. Using them, two new parameters, emergency response priority number (ERPN)... 

Recently, various approaches have been introduced to estimate the response of offshore structures in different sea states by stepwisely intensifying records. In this article, a more practical approach entitled Modified Endurance Wave Analysis (MEWA) considering the random and probabilistic nature of wave loading and utilizing optimal time duration is introduced. Generation procedure of this approach is described based on two practical wave theories: random and constrained new-wave. In addition, assessment of a simplified model representing a typical fixed offshore platform under extreme wave conditions in the Persian Gulf is performed making use of MEWA. A comparative analysis has been also... 

The exact and two approximate conditional spectra are compared in this manuscript as a target spectrum for the purpose of ground motion selection. The considered site is a real offshore site located at South Pars Gas Field in the Persian Gulf region. This case study site is influenced by four major seismic area sources in which the deaggregation results confirm that many comparable seismic scenarios can be taken into account. Therefore, an alternative to the conventional approximate conditional spectrum is proposed that has a small deviation from the exact solution. In addition, the use of different conditioning status of the probabilistic seismic hazard deaggregation (i.e., occurrence... 

The Vapour Assisted Petroleum Extraction (VAPEX) process, a newly developed Enhanced Heavy Oil Recovery process, is a promising EOR method for certain conventional non-fractured heavy oil sandstone reservoirs such as those in Canada, but its applicability on low permeable Naturally Fractured Reservoirs (NFR) such as those in the Middle East and Persian Gulf still remained as a question. Previous studies show that the foremost concern for VAPEX application in the case of NFR is the low non-economical production rates. The aim of the present work is to study the effect of fractures geometrical properties such as orientation (vertical or horizontal), density, spacing, location and networking on... 

Toe to heel air injection has been studied on non-fractured sandstone models and is found to be a promising enhanced oil recovery method for certain heavy oil reservoirs, such as those in Canada, but its applicability on fractured reservoirs, such as those in the Middle East, is not investigated yet. The objective of this article is to evaluate the effect of fractures geometrical parameters, such as fracture density, orientation, and location, on the performance of the process in laboratory scale. Simulation results showed that toe-to-heel air injection is more applicable on highly networked fractured reservoirs, such as those that occur in Persian Gulf coast compared to lower density... 

The top-down in situ combustion (ISC) involves the stable propagation of the combustion front from the top vertical injector to the bottom horizontal producer. Apart from laboratory studies in conventional sandstones, no application of the process in fractured carbonates has been addressed yet. The authors modified a successful combustion tube history matched model of an Iranian low-permeable heavy oil reservoir called Kuh-E-Mond to investigate the feasibility of ISC in fractured carbonate reservoirs mimicking block-scale combustion cells. Effects of fractured geometrical properties such as orientation, location, extension, density, spacing, and dispersion were considered. Results confirmed... 

The assessment of existing platforms under past environmental (wave, wind, current and etc.) loads and probable future loads (earthquake) is a relatively new process and has not yet been standardized as the design has. This lack of standardization creates some difficulty in establishing performance requirements which must be developed depending upon the risks (i.e., hazards, exposures and consequences) associated with the future operation of the platform. The present criteria of the offshore structure standards for seismic assessment can be improved using Building prestandards. Recently some documents such as FEMA-356 and ATC-40 are developed for seismic assessment of buildings. However... 

Herein, we demonstrated a facile method for the fabrication of magnetic and superhydrophobic polyurethane sponge with water contact angle of 159° as an adsorbent for cleanup the marine oil spill pollution. For this aim, a polyurethane sponge was coated with carbon black (CB), hexagonal boron nitride (h-BN)@Fe3O4, and acrylic resin and then characterized by different techniques. Owing to the chemical and thermal stability of h-BN and CB, the modified sponge was stable under corrosive conditions (pH = 1–14 and salt solutions) and at different temperatures (−12 °C–105 °C). In addition to common oils and organic solvents, we also used the real spilled oils containing monoaromatics and... 

In this paper a new approach is introduced for structural health monitoring of offshore jacket platforms. The procedure uses the measured ambient vibration responses and the corresponding readable natural frequencies and mode shapes of the structural system. Since offshore platforms are composed of heavy topsides supported by jacket structures, participation of the first mode is dominant in each direction in the response of the structure under field excitations. Moreover, ambient vibrations such as wave loads and boat impacts only excite the first modes of the structure. Therefore, it is difficult to find higher modes and the pertinent frequencies by use of accelerometers data. The... 

Jacket-type offshore platforms play an important role in oil and gas industries in shallow and intermediate water depths such as Persian Gulf region. Such important structures need accurate considerations in analysis, design and assessment procedures. In this paper, nonlinear response of jacket-type platforms against extreme waves is examined utilizing sensitivity analyses. Results of this paper can reduce the number of random variables and consequently the computational effort in reliability analysis of jacket platforms, noticeably. Effects of foundation modeling have been neglected in majority of researches on the response of jacket platforms against wave loads. As nonlinear response of... 

Choosing the right location for the sustainable development of offshore wind energy plays an important role in the success of renewable projects. In this regard, in the present study, a new application of the hybrid Fuzzy-SWARA & Fuzzy-WASPAS method was presented to prioritize the suitable area for developing offshore wind projects. For a case study, five regions with high potential for offshore wind energy in the Persian-Gulf have been investigated. Economic assessment was evaluated using the Levelized Cost of energy method. Evaluation of offshore wind farms has been analyzed from various aspects including technical, economic, social, environmental and risk. The SWARA was used for weighting... 

Determination of different facies in an underground reservoir with the aid of various applicable neural network methods can improve the reservoir modeling. Accordingly facies identification from well logs and cores data information is considered as the most prominent recent tasks of geological engineering. The aim of this study is to analyze and compare the five artificial neural networks (ANN) approaches with identification of various structures in a rock facies and evaluate their capability in contrast to the labor intensive conventional method. The selected networks considered are Backpropagation Neural Networks (BPNN), Radial Basis Function (RBF), Probabilistic Neural Networks (PNN),... 

Determination of different facies in an underground reservoir with the aid of various applicable neural network methods can improve the reservoir modeling. Accordingly facies identification from well logs and cores data information is considered as the most prominent recent tasks of geological engineering. The aim of this study is to analyze and compare the five artificial neural networks (ANN) approaches with identification of various structures in a rock facies and evaluate their capability in contrast to the labor intensive conventional method. The selected networks considered are Backpropagation Neural Networks (BPNN), Radial Basis Function (RBF), Probabilistic Neural Networks (PNN),... 

This study presents a parallel evolutionary optimization approach to determine optimal management strategies of large-scale coastal groundwater problems. The population loops of evolutionary algorithms (EA) are parallelized using shared memory parallelism to address the high computational demands of such applications. This methodology is applied to solve the management problems in an aquifer system in Kish Island, Iran using a three-dimensional density-dependent groundwater numerical model. EAs of continuous ant colony optimization (CACO), particle swarm optimization, and genetic algorithm are utilized to solve the optimization problems. By implementing the parallelization strategy, a... 

Environmental degradation due to economic activities is a key challenge facing sustainable development. The fossil fuel production sector is a very polluting industry. In this research, the future trends of pollution accumulation in the region due to direct/indirect oily discharge into the semi-enclosed area of the Persian Gulf are studied. The purpose of the study was not only to alert policy-makers about potential future threats in the region but also to conduct a trial to develop potential solutions to these problems. Four different environmental cases were studied via the principle of system dynamic modeling simulation. The cases consisted of three situations: relaxed, simple policy, and... 

In this study, the impacts of salinity, ion type, and aging process were investigated on coalescence and spreading of crude oil interfaces (including an oil droplet and an oil film) under gravity, through drop rest time measurement techniques, aided by an image analysis system. Three different salt solutions of NaCl, Na2SO4, and MgCl2 were studied at different ionic strengths, ranged from 1% to 150% of Persian Gulf seawater ionic strength. According to the results, aging the oil droplet in the brine increased the interfacial rigidity. Addition of a gas phase - by thinning the surface oil film - almost doubled both rest time and spreading time values. In the aged mode, the presence of salt in...