Sharif Digital Repository

Capillary continuity between adjacent matrix blocks through formation of liquid bridge controls the recovery factor of gravity drainage process in fractured reservoirs. However, stability of liquid bridges as well as related capillary pressure in horizontal rough fractures is not well discussed in the available literature. In this work, new models of rough-walled fracture are developed and the role of roughness size and frequency on formation of liquid bridge and fracture capillary pressure are investigated. The Young-Laplace equation is numerically solved to characterize the liquid bridge formed in the proposed models of rough fractures. Critical fracture aperture for a range of liquid... 

Spontaneous imbibition, defined as the displacement of nonwetting phase by wetting phase in porous media by action of capillary forces, is important in many applications within earth sciences and in particular in naturally fractured oil and gas reservoirs. Hence, it is critical to investigate the various aspects of this process to correctly model the fractured reservoir behavior. In this study, twenty four experiments were conducted to study the effect of rock properties, lithology of porous medium, brine viscosity and boundary conditions on displacement rate and final recovery by cocurrent spontaneous imbibition (COCSI) in brine-oil systems. The results can be extended to brine-gas systems,... 

The discontinuous Galerkin method is used to solve the non-linear spherical shallow water equations with Coriolis force. The numerical method is well-balanced and takes wetting/drying into account. The two fold goal of this work is a comparative study of dynamic and static tsunami generation by seabed displacement and the careful validation of these source models. The numerical results show that the impact of the choice of seabed displacement model can be significant and that using a static approach may result in inaccurate results. For the validation of the studies, we consider measurements from satellites and buoy networks for the 2011 Tohoku event and the 2004 Sumatra–Andaman tsunami. The... 

Changing the wettability of reservoir rock towards strongly water-wet state is effective way to enhance oil recovery from fractured carbonate reservoirs which are typically oil-wet. Regarding this fact, the injection of surfactant and the bacterial solution as EOR agents is proposed in the current work as a potential method to alter the wettability of rock surface reservoir. Nevertheless, there is a definite lack of experimental data regarding this method and the synergistic effect of both chemical and bacterial solutions on this process. In this study, the sole and combined effects of the bacterial solution using an Enterobacter cloacae strain as a biosurfactant-producer are compared with... 

In the current study, a novel approach which takes into account the effectiveness of both convectional surfactants and biosurfactants was investigated. The biosurfactant produced by Enterobacter cloacae strain was utilized concomitant with conventional surfactant (sodium dodecyl benzene sulfonate (SDBS)) to evaluate its capability to reduce the SDBS adsorption on rock surface (biosurfactant acts as sacrificial agent) or synergistically enhance the effectiveness of the SDBS. In this regard, the wettability alteration and interfacial tension (IFT) measurements and calculation of spreading coefficient were performed considering two different scenarios. In the first scenario, SDBS was added to... 

Highly collapsible loessial soils are characterized by an open void structure that can experience significant settlement upon loading. In the field, these partially saturated Aeolian deposits are particularly susceptible to wetting-induced collapse. Due to difficulties in preparing undisturbed specimens from highly collapsible soils, previous studies have generally performed laboratory tests on reconstituted specimens with different water contents and densities, and the effect of disturbance on the initial state of the soil was ignored. Disturbance in highly collapsible soil specimens may significantly affect the natural composition of the soil matrix, the non-homogeneous distribution of... 

Hydro collapsible soils are of kinds of problematic soils which show high shear strength at low degrees of saturation but due to wetting, their Meta stable structure collapses and will be subjected to large deformation. In this study by applying isotropic triaxial loadings to undisturbed samples, mechanical behavior of a highly collapsible loessial soil has been assessed. During tests, matric suction of the samples was controlled as well as the mean net stress, and the variation of the degree of saturation was monitored continuously. Two types of stress paths were conducted on the samples namely "Isotropic induced collapse" under applying constant matric suctions and "wetting induced... 

This paper describes results of an advanced suction controlled triaxial test device on a loessial soil in an attempt to define the constitutive relationship between suction stress and matric suction (suction stress characteristic curve) for highly collapsible soils. Due to the presence of void spaces with different degrees of collapse potential within the soil matrix, the collapse phenomenon in loess is believed to be a continuous-stepwise reduction in volume rather than a sudden drop during wetting. Due to this unique volume change behavior, the definition of the suction stress characteristic curve for loess may require a soil-specific experimental testing approach capable of making precise... 

This paper is related to the studies taken place during last decade to understand the intact behavior of a Collapsible Loess subjected to loading and wetting at Advanced Soil Mechanics Laboratory of Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran. In this regard intact block samples are carefully taken from Hezar Pich Hill in the city of Gorgan, Iran, and various tests are performed on undisturbed specimens recovered from the intact block samples. In this way three automated unsaturated oedometer are built and a conventional triaxial apparatus is upgraded to a fully automated unsaturated triaxial device to accommodate rigorous and different stress and wetting path with continuous data... 

In this article, the design and operation of a cylindrical capacitive sensor based on the dielectric reactance capacitance and conductance changes of the gap medium is reported. The proposed system was used to determine characteristics of different water liquids as a result of the capacitance and resistance variations. The air gap capacitance (dry signal) is measured and then by filling the gap with a liquid, the capacitance (wet signal) is monitored for different liquids. A reported sensor is used for the distilled, tap, boiled, and salt water measurements and the capacitance and resistance results are compared. A big difference of about 38.5 μF in the measured capacitance values for the... 

Design and operation of an optical fiber sensor based on the intensity modulation is reported in this article. Two distinct mechanisms are considered for the optical power loss and the sensor operation is explained in terms of these effects. The dominant loss mechanism is found to be the evanescent loss and based on this phenomenon the optical fiber sensor is designed. Performance of this sensor is tested as a liquid level sensor for water and the experimental results are reported. The dry and wet signals for this probe are measured for a series of measurements and important factors concerning the design and operation of sensor are described. The precision of measured values, reproducibility... 

Oil polarity is an important property impacting the efficiency of low salinity waterflooding (LSWF). It directly affects fluid/fluid and rock/fluid interactions, controlling the interfacial properties and forces. However, the current findings in the literature on the effect of concentration of polar components on oil recovery by LSWF are contradictory. Therefore, the main objective of this paper is to investigate how the type of non-polar fractions and the concentration of acidic polar oil constituents change the trapped oil saturation at the pore-scale during LSWF. In this regard, we conducted a series of microfluidics LSWF experiments in both secondary and tertiary modes, using clay-free... 

Oil polarity is an important property impacting the efficiency of low salinity waterflooding (LSWF). It directly affects fluid/fluid and rock/fluid interactions, controlling the interfacial properties and forces. However, the current findings in the literature on the effect of concentration of polar components on oil recovery by LSWF are contradictory. Therefore, the main objective of this paper is to investigate how the type of non-polar fractions and the concentration of acidic polar oil constituents change the trapped oil saturation at the pore-scale during LSWF. In this regard, we conducted a series of microfluidics LSWF experiments in both secondary and tertiary modes, using clay-free... 

Modeling and simulation of fixed bed three-phase catalytic reactors are considered for wet air catalytic oxidation of phenol to perform a comparative numerical analysis between tricklebed and packed-bubble column reactors. The modeling involves material balances both for the catalyst particle as well as for different fluid phases. Catalyst deactivation is also considered in a transient reactor model to investigate the effects of various parameters including reactor temperature on catalyst deactivation. The simulation results indicated that packed-bubble columns were slightly superior in performance than trickle beds. It was also found that reaction temperature was the most effective... 

The present study employs Discrete Element Method (DEM) to establish a rheological model that relates the apparent viscosity of a granular material to shear rate, normal stress, and water saturation. In addition, a theoretical model was developed to determine water distribution and water-induced forces between particles for different saturations. The resulting forces were embedded in a 3D shear cell as a numerical rheometer, and a wet specimen was sheared between two walls. A power law rheological model was then obtained as a function of inertia number and saturation. It was found that up to a critical saturation, the apparent viscosity increased with saturation that was higher than that of... 

A family of matrix embedding steganographic schemes for digital images is investigated. The target schemes are applied to blocks of n pixels in a cover image. In every block, at most m pixels are allowed to change with q-ary steps. We have derived some upper bounds on the embedding efficiency of these schemes for different values on m. It is also shown that these upper bounds approach the general upper bound on the embedding efficiency of q-ary steganography. For the case of q=3, we have shown that there is no feasible optimum member of the family for m=2, although for m=1, a well-known example exists. Instead, for m=2, a new close-to-bound scheme in the family is presented which exploits... 

A family of matrix embedding steganographic schemes for digital images is investigated. The target schemes are applied to blocks of n pixels in a cover image. In every block, at most m pixels are allowed to change with q-ary steps. We have derived some upper bounds on the embedding efficiency of these schemes for different values on m. It is also shown that these upper bounds approach the general upper bound on the embedding efficiency of q-ary steganography. For the case of q=3, we have shown that there is no feasible optimum member of the family for m=2, although for m=1, a well-known example exists. Instead, for m=2, a new close-to-bound scheme in the family is presented which exploits... 

Three-dimensional porous nanocomposites consisting of gelatin-carboxymethylcellulose (CMC) cross-linked by carboxylic acids biopolymers and monophasic hydroxyapatite (HA) nanostructures were fabricated by lyophilization, for soft-bone-tissue engineering. The bioactive ceramic nanostructures were prepared by a novel wet-chemical and low-temperature procedure from marine wastes containing calcium carbonates. The effect of surface-active molecules, including sodium dodecyl sulfate (SDS) and hexadecyltrimethylammonium bromide (CTAB), on the morphology of HA nanostructures is shown. It is demonstrated that highly bioactive and monophasic HA nanorods with an aspect ratio > 10 can be synthesized in... 

Relative permeability curves have practical implications in petroleum reservoir simulations. Study of the effects of reservoir wettability, pore shape geometry, and viscosity ratio of flowing fluids on the relative permeabilities is of great importance in reservoir modeling. In this paper, lattice Boltzmann method (LBM) is employed for analyzing the two-fluid flow in rigid porous media. The developed LBM code proved to be a robust numerical tool for analyzing the factors that influence the relative permeabilities of two immiscible fluids flowing through porous media. The numerically derived relative permeability curves demonstrate that in neutrally wet reservoirs, the effect of viscosity... 

Microfluidic systems (MFS) provide a range of advantages in biomedical applications, including improved controllability of material characteristics and lower consumption of reagents, energy, time and money. Fabrication of MFS employs various materials, such as glass, silicon, ceramics, paper, and metals such as gold, copper, aluminum, chromium and titanium. In this review, gold thin film microfluidic channels (GTFMFC) are discussed with reference to fabrication methods and their diverse use in chemical and biomedical applications. The advantages of gold thin films (GTF) include flexibility, ease of manufacture, adhesion to polymer surfaces, chemical stability, good electrical conductivity,...