Sharif Digital Repository

The kidney is one of the most complicated organs in terms of structure and physiology, in part because it is highly vascularized. Previous investigations have focused on specific characteristics like length and diameter. There are a few methods like those which are based on image processing techniques, that have been focused on all features as a unique structure. The clear drawback of these approaches is inability to justify growth and changes. Lindenmayer system (L-system) is parallel rewriting method and a type of graph grammars. L-system can justify growth and all characteristic changes and adopt itself to them. Parametric rewriting rules incorporating within physiological laws of the... 

A genetic-based pore network extraction method from micro-CT images is proposed in this work. Several variables such as the number, radius and location of pores, the coordination number, as well as the radius and length of the throats are used herein as the optimization parameters. Two methods are presented for modeling the pore network structure. Unlike the previous models, these methods are directly based on minimizing the error between the extracted network and the real porous medium. This leads to the generation of more accurate results while reducing required computational memories. Two different objective functions are used in building the network. In the first method, only the... 

Hydrocarbon reservoirs development and management is based on their dynamic models. To encounter various types of error during model building, model parameters are adjusted to produce reservoir historical data by assimilation (history matching) of reservoir production or 4D seismic data. Among the existing sequential methods for automatic history matching, ensemble Kalman filter and its variants have displayed promising results. The innovations of this thesis for ensemble Kalman filter (EnKF) are presented into three major orients; these includes adaptive localization/regularization, characterization of original PUNQ test model and characterization of channelized reservoir.
To mitigate... 

Process optimization is a technique by which the plant operating condition is obtained such that a specific objective is achieved while the other process requirements are still met. These requirements can include product quality specifications, physical equipment limitations, and the constraints corresponding to the environmental, health, and safety issues. Frequently, this objective is an economic one. In the process optimization, the use of improper optimization techniques may lead to impractical results. One of these strategies is the plant wide optimization. In order to show the effect of plant wide optimization, one should use a complicated enough process as a bench mark of the... 

Hydrocarbon reservoir management and development as well as planning of enhanced oil recovery (EOR) processes are based on the reservoir dynamic model. Thus, successful implementation of EOR scenarios greatly depends on the quality of the dynamic model and accuracy of the associated parameters in order to correctly describe fluid flow through porous media. First, a dynamic model is constructed based on the prior knowledge. However, because of the various types of error during model building, the prior model is not so accurate and perfect. Accordingly, new observation data, such as production and 4D seismic data, are utilized to calibrate the prior model and characterize the reservoir under a... 

In this research, the aim is to investigate the use of data assimilation method for better reservoir model updating in the reservoir management. In addition, multi-objective optimization concept is studied for the production optimization. The application of these methods is applied for reservoir management in the naturally fractured reservoirs. To update the reservoir, ensemble based methods, especially ensemble Kalman filter and ensemble smoother, are used. To tackle the challenges encountered with these methods, modifications are proposed to obtain a better history matching and more accurate reservoir characterization. The proposed framework for history matching is implemented for the... 

The environmental impact of process plants is one of the causes of the environmental disturbance in the world. Including the effects of these destructive impacts can be mentioned to the phenomena such as global warming, climate change, severe air pollution and water shortage. Hence, the economic justification of a process, without the review of relevance of its environmental impacts, it does not lead to the implementation and construction of a process plant. For this reason, it is a requirement to provide a software platform (preferably object-oriented) for quick and automatic checking of this item and the exact determining of these effects. On the other hand, due to the complexity of the... 

Digital analysis of reservoir rocks prepares a powerful tool in the field of porous media studies and provides appropriate information of single / multiphase flows by performing numerical simulations on porous media images. In order to access the necessary tools to benefit from digital rock analysis and characterization, we need accessing the porous media images, the geometric distribution and the spatial distribution of pores and grains through imaging or reconstruction methods. Porous media reconstruction methods are known as an alternative to imaging techniques. In addition, reconstruction methods have the ability to fix problems and imperfections associated with imaging, such as... 

Kidney is one of the most complicated organs in terms of functionality and physiology due to its complicated unique vascular structure. Previous investigations have focused on specific characteristics like length and diameter. Most of these methods are based on Image Processing techniques which prevent a comprehensive study in growth and changes of the vascular system. Lindenmyaer system (L-system) is a parallel rewriting system and a type of formal grammar and had been used to create graphs and natural patterns. By absorbing the physiological characteristics of the kidney and integrating them into parametric L-system, a highly dense and accurate vascular system could be generated with few... 

The industrial paradigm shift toward intelligent and sustainable management stimulates policymakers to leverage artificial intelligence for the decentralized planning of chemical industries with energy networks. By doing so, this work firstly presents a simulation framework to investigate the rigorous transient behavior of integrated systems comprising natural gas and power transmission networks, along with a chemical plant whose feedstock is natural gas. This framework entails dynamic models for the gas transmission network and the SynGas plant, and a continuous-time AC-power flow formulation with dispatchable loads. It addresses the following key challenges: (i) analyzing energy and...