Sharif Digital Repository

In the aftermath of earthquakes, hospitals serve the critical role of treating casualties. In many cases, the key components of a hospital (i.e., the building, staff, medicine inventory, technical systems, and medical equipment) are affected by an earthquake. To handle the demand surge, affected hospitals should recover in an effective manner. Hospital recovery is a complex and dynamic process because each component requires specific types and amount of resources to recover. Furthermore, the recovery of each component not only affects its performance but also plays a role in the overall hospital recovery. Hospital administrators need to model the complex recovery process after a future... 

The Ni-base superalloy GTD-111 is used as a blading material in the first stage blades of high power gas turbines. The creep-rupture properties of the cast superalloy were studied over a wide range of temperatures and stresses. The observations of dislocation structures during steady-state creep confirmed that the creep mechanism was different in the high and low stress regions. The results showed that in the high stress region, shear mechanisms including stacking fault formation and anti-phase boundary creation were operative and in the low stress region, a by-passing mechanism occurred by either looping or dislocation climb and glide. With increasing exposure time in the high-temperature... 

A novel photolithography-based technique was developed to fabricate a quasi-2D heterogeneous calcite micromodel of representative elementary volume size. The effect of brine-chemistry on the mobilization of capillarity and heterogeneity trapped oil after high salinity water injection was evaluated by using diluted seawater, and seawater modified with calcium, sulphate, and silica nanoparticles. Preliminary brine screening was performed based on modified contact angle experiments under dynamic salinity alteration. The main findings are that the chemical composition of brine impacts both the ultimate oil recovery and its speed. The highest and fastest oil recovery was obtained with diluted... 

This paper addresses the problem of recovering sparse link vectors with network topological constraints that is motivated by network inference and tomography applications. We propose a novel framework called UCS-NT in the context of compressive sensing for sparse recovery in networks. In order to efficiently recover sparse specification of link vectors, we construct a feasible measurement matrix using this framework through connected paths. It is theoretically shown that, only O(k log(n)) path measurements are sufficient for uniquely recovering any k-sparse link vector. Moreover, extensive simulations demonstrate that this framework would converge to an accurate solution for a wide class of... 

The Discrete Fracture Network and Dual Continuum concept are two common methods to model naturally fractured reservoirs. Each has specific limitations. The newly introduced recovery curve method is believed to be a compromise between these two current methods. In the recovery curve method, two recovery curves for water and gas displacements are used to more realistically calculate matrix-fracture mass exchanges. This paper presents a new approach to determine appropriate recovery curves by using the recovery curve method and production data. In particular, two recovery curves were determined for a column model by matching phase contact positions throughout the production data. Hybrid genetic... 

Both frequency and intensity of natural disasters have intensified in recent years. It is, therefore, essential to design effective strategies to minimize their catastrophic consequences. Optimizing recovery tasks, including distribution system reconfiguration (DSR) and repair sequence optimization (RSO), are the key to enhance the agility of disaster recovery. This article aims to develop a resilience-oriented DSR and RSO optimization model and a mechanism to quantify the recovery agility. In doing so, a new metric is developed to quantify the recovery agility and to identify the optimal resilience enhancement strategies. The metric is defined as 'the number of recovered customers divided... 

Due to role of polymer in increasing sweep efficiency during oil recovery, much attention has been paid to the using polymer solutions in enhanced oil recovery methods. In spite of the existence of the great researches in this area, the role of nanoparticles in modification of the polymer performance in the presence of salts has not been examined before. Furthermore, there is no information about how the dispersed silica nanoparticles affect the heavy oil recovery during the polymer flooding in the presence of divalent cations. In this study, a series of polymer flooding experiments are performed in a quarter five-spot glass micromodel saturated with heavy oil. Solutions of polyacrylamide... 

The authors simulated a reservoir by using two-layer perceptron. Indeed a model was developed to simulate the increase in oil recovery caused by bacteria injection into an oil reservoir. This model was affected by reservoir temperature and amount of water injected into the reservoir for enhancing oil recovery. Comparing experimental and simulation results and also the erratic trend of data show that the neural networks have modeled this system properly. Considering the effects of nonlinear factors and their erratic and unknown impacts on recovered oil, the perceptron neural network can develop a proper model for oil recovery factor in various conditions. The neural networks have not been... 

In this paper, which is an extended version of our work at LVA/ICA 2010 [1], the problem of Inter Symbol Interface (ISI) Sparse channel estimation and equalization will be investigated. We firstly propose an adaptive method based on the idea of Least Mean Square (LMS) algorithm and the concept of smoothed l0 (SL0) norm presented in [2] for estimation of sparse ISI channels. Afterwards, a new non-adaptive fast channel estimation method based on SL0 sparse signal representation is proposed. ISI channel estimation will have a direct effect on the performance of the ISI equalizer at the receiver. So, in this paper we investigate this effect in the case of optimal Maximum Likelihood... 

CO2 injection is a potentially viable method of enhanced oil recovery for medium oil reservoirs. The authors compare the effect of gas injection strategy (simultaneous water-alternating gas [SWAG], water-alternating gas [WAG], and continuous gas injection [CGI]) on recovery in immiscible, near-miscible, and miscible modes of injection. It has been proved that CGI is not the most efficient injection scenario in oil-wet reservoirs. Miscible and near-miscible core flood tests demonstrated high oil recoveries in all injection strategies due to high capillary numbers achieved as a result of miscibility. The fluid mechanics of floods were discussed using pressure drop data, different mechanics was... 

Abstract original image Smart Enhanced Oil Recovery Process using Core–Shell Nanoparticles: The cover image denotes schematically the enhanced oil recovery process by flooding using an aqueous dispersion of core–shell nanoparticles made up of protected polyacrylamide nanostructures (PPNs). Y. Tamsilian and his colleagues at Sharif University of Technology (Iran) and the Institute for Polymer Material (POLYMAT, Spain) demonstrated the synthesis of polyacrylamide nanoparticles protected with a hydrophobic polystyrene shell by using a one-pot, two-step inverse emulsion polymerization technique, where the polystyrene shell was created by surface polymerization. The presence of the hydrophobic... 

Suppose that a solution x to an underdetermined linear system b=Ax is given. x is approximately sparse meaning that it has a few large components compared to other small entries. However, the total number of nonzero components of x is large enough to violate any condition for the uniqueness of the sparsest solution. On the other hand, if only the dominant components are considered, then it will satisfy the uniqueness conditions. One intuitively expects that x should not be far from the true sparse solution x0. It was already shown that this intuition is the case by providing upper bounds on ||x-x0|| which are functions of the magnitudes of small components of x but independent from x0. In... 

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)  

The goal of this work is separation and recovery of catalyst residue in wastewater and byproducts of PTA (poly terephetalic acid) unit. Catalyst recovery consists in separating the maximum amount of catalyst and changing the same into valuable compounds. The PTA unit uses cobalt catalyst for oxidation reactions. The byproducts, which contain catalyst, were burned. In the case of metal oxide recovery in the ashes of waste materials, we could solve the problem of the Petrochemical Company. This new method may help us to recover catalyst from wastewater in PTA unit, after which small amounts of ions may be absorbed on a column filled with special absorbent, in such a way that the wastewater... 

Nanoemulsion is a novel type of emulsified solutions holding great promises for utilizing in industrial applications. Although microemulsions have been the subject of numerous studies in past decades, however, nanoemulsions are quite virgin and merit detailed investigation to scrutinize their characteristics specific to reservoir engineering, in particular, Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR). To this end, the present study is an attempt to evaluate the effectiveness of a specific nanoemulsion for oil displacement through porous media. In this regard, flooding experiments were designed and Hexa decyl trimethylammonium bromide (CTAB), which is a cationic surfactant, was used as the emulsifying agent.... 

A new structure for the compression surfaces of a supersonic inlet is proposed which has improved the target performance parameter i.e. total pressure recovery ratio. This idea resulted in development of a new type of supersonic inlet, utilized four ramps and a cone simultaneously as the compression surfaces. A prototype of the proposed inlet has been designed for a free stream Mach number of 3 and its performance has been evaluated via numerical simulation for both design and off-design conditions. The performance of the newly designed inlet has been compared to the existing experimental data of two double-cone inlets. The acquired data are further compared with analytical calculations of... 

In this study, a combination of energy and exergy analysis is applied for the industrial sulfur recovery unit (SRU) in commercial simulation software. The data of energy and exergy are obtained from the simulator and Excel (for physical and chemical exergy), respectively. In doing so, five intensified SRU configurations namely: (1) hot gas bypass (2) acid gas bypass (3) inlet stream preheating (4) acid gas enrichment and (5) oxygen (air) enrichment are compared in terms of energy production, reaction furnace temperature, sulfur recovery and pollutant emission into environment. Then, irreversibility in these five arrangements is compared and all the proposed methods show higher useful exergy... 

In this brief, an imaging methodology for mono-static millimeter-wave systems is introduced. When the measured object hologram is piece-wise smooth with sharp boundaries, both low-pass and high-pass components are present in a transform domain. Nevertheless, the edges are sparse in transform domain with respect to the image dimensions. It is shown that the down-sampling of the hologram with an appropriate rate determined by the sparsity level, includes the adequate information of all components for image reconstruction. Using random samples, an algorithm is proposed to recover all the sparse components, iteratively. Simulation results illustrate that a high-resolution recovery can be... 

The Natural Gas Liquids (NGL) recovery unit is one of the processes that requires cooling. The sweetened gas enters this unit after the dehydration stage, and the final product called NGL Product is stored and ready for consumption or export. In this research, the first, one of the NGL units, is simulated with HYSYS software. Three types of processes with different cooling systems are studied using the exergy analysis method. Joule-Thomson's combination with the expander is selected for its high exergy efficiency, and the exergy efficiency function has been selected as the objective function 1 to optimize this process mathematically based on this study's findings. The critical term in this...