Sharif Digital Repository

Fractured carbonate reservoirs are mostly oil-wet to intermediate-wet. Due to the negative capillary pressure of the matrix poor spontaneous imbibition of reservoir brine occurs in such reservoirs, and water flooding leads into early break through due to the high conductivity of the fracture network. Some surfactants have the ability to change the wettability of rock matrix toward water-wet state by adsorbing onto the rock surface. The phenomenon can result in spontaneous imbibition improvement and thereby increasing water flooding efficiency and recovery from fractured carbonate reservoirs. In this thesis the effect of some surfactants on the wettability of Iranian carbonate reservoir rocks... 

The effects of biosurfactants on sandstone rocks are known in the literature. However, there are few examples of experimental works in Iranian carbonate reservoirs dealing with the effects of biosurfactants under reservoir conditions. This thesis discusses the effect of an efficient biosurfactant produced from Pseudomonas aeroginosa MRo1, a bacterial strain isolated from oil excavation areas in southern Iran, on the recovery of residual oil trapped within carbonate rocks was investigated. The MRO1 could reduce surface tension from 72 to 28 dyne/cm. It also could reduce Interfacial tension from 18.382 to 5.646 dyne/cm.
In a core holder set-up bearing four limestone- and... 

After primary and secondary recovery processes more than 50 percent of oil remains in reservoirs. Therefore for more recovery from these reservoirs, methods of enhanced oil recovery should be applied.In this paper the effect of nanoparticles of SiO2 in size of 14 nm, on wettability is investigated. Using this nanoparticle, the wettability of carbonate rock in reservoirs could be changed and alter from oil-wet or mix-wet to water-wet. To assess this, hydrophilic changes of sandstone core and carbonate core are studied using the contact angle test. The same test is done on the carbonate core saturated with brine and oil that had received injection with brine and nanoparticles of SiO2 with two... 

A droplet placed on the boundary of two solids with different wettabilities will move to the more wettable part. This is a well-known phenomenon and has been extensively used in a variety of processes and applications ranging from biological systems and ink jet printing to the commercial lab-on-a-chip. Because of its importance, many studies are conducted around this phenomenon. The difference between the equilibrium contact angles of the droplet on the two parts gives rise to an interfacial driving force which moves the droplet. Such a motion is not continuous as the droplet slides to the more wettable area, the driving force diminishes and consequently the droplet stops. A non-stop motion... 

Uranium is the most important element in the nuclear fuel cycle. Recovery of uranium from waste produced at every stage of the fuel cycle is not only economically important, but also environmentally important. In the production phase of uranium hexafluoride, certain amount of solid waste is produced in the bottom of the fluorination reactor. In order to extract the uranium from this waste, we have to eliminate the fluorine contained in the waste. This is because the fluorine forms strong complex with uranyl ions during the extraction process, and prevents from efficient extraction of uranium. In the current thesis؛ first, we examined the characteristics of the waste ... 

There is increasing evidence that injecting modified brines has a significant impact on the amount of oil recovered, but the exact mechanism by which this occurs is an unsettled issue, and is supposed to be a cause of the complex interactions occurring between the phases insitu. In this thesis, surface chemistry of smart water has been investigated. Fluid/solid and fluid/fluid interactions for Bangestan crude oil in tfhe presence of designed solutions and a set of dilutions of Persian Gulf seawater have been studied and compared. Fluid/solid interactions were investigated through wettability studies. Impact of salinity and ionic composition on this interaction was measured through contact... 

This research was done for feasibility evaluation and understanding correct microbial enhanced oil recovery(MEOR) procedure for carbonate reservoirs. With the aim of cost reduction and possible activation of smart water mechanisms, sea water used as a base for MEOR process. Two biosurfactant producing strains were isolated from oil contaminated water and soil, and one halotolerant strain, from sea water. Optimization of biosurfactant yield was conducted and two new definitions for optimum point, by considering economical and technical facts, were proposed. Partial characterization of produced biosurfactant was carried out through FTIR and NMR analysis and the produced biosurfactant was... 

Quite a few methods have been reported to synthesize monolayer MoS2, which has recently attracted scientist attentions. Fully controlled conditions, however, have not been achieved in these methods. In this research, two-dimensional MoS2 nanofilms have been synthesized by Chemical Vaper Deposition (CVD). Layer thickness of synthesized layer and effects of various parameters of used method have been investigated. Although every scientist synthesizes 2D MoS2 at 650°C in the CVD method by using seeds, in this research, it has been proved that MoS2 nanofilms can be produced at 575°C without using any seeds, which leads to lower consumption of time and price and increases the quality of... 

This study investigates three-dimensional modeling of nanodroplets over chemically patterned surfaces. The pattern can be established by changing the contact angle on the surface. The problem is studied numerically by solving the thin film equations.Both the long-range and short-range inter-molecular interactions are considered. The numerical procedure is validated by using the theoretical studies. The effects of parameters such as the size of the droplets, the gradient of the surface, and the slip coefficient on the dynamics and speed of droplets and the shape of them during the motion are inspected.By examining the dynamics of the system it is revealed that the velocity of the droplets... 

Imbibition process is known to be an important recovery mechanism in naturally fractured reservoirs with water-wet matrix blocks that are imposed to water influx from an active aquifer or water flooding. Matrix blocks which are subjected to water flooding or water invasion from active aquifers do not become immersed in water at once, but they experience gradual rising of water in fracture. But most of imbibition studies are performed under conditions of totally immersed cores in static aqueous phase. Surfactants are known to reduce residual oil saturation by decreasing interfacial tension (IFT) between oil and water. On the other hand, considerable reduction of IFT due to surfactant... 

Recent studies have shown that comprehensive characterization of the behavior of infilled rock fractures under saturated and unsaturated conditions requires knowledge of morphological details of fracture surface, as well as state of stress of infill materials and their initial innate conditions (e.g., void ratio, water content, degree of saturation and dry density). This study presents the details and typical results from a new testing approach to study the hydro-mechanical behavior of the infilled rock fractures under different stress states and saturation conditions. The new testing approach incorporates the axis translation technique for suction control, a flow pump for the measurement of... 

During production from gas condensate reservoirs, reservoir pressure decreses to lower than dew point pressure of the reservoir fluid. Consequently, condensates will form in near wellbore regions, which significantly decrease well productivity. One of the remediations that is recently proposed for solving this problem is wettability alteration of near wellbore region to gas wetting condition. In comparison to other methods, it provides a better permanency, which is its key advantage. The main purpose of this thesis is, quantitative, qualitative and modeling study of wettability alteration of rock to gas wetting condition and verification of modeling rsults for a reservoir rock sample. Also,... 

In the past decades, electrospinning has been widely used for the production of micro/nanofibers. In spite of the simplicity and effectivity of the conventional electrospinning for fabricating nanofibers, compact structure and small pores of the nanofibers hinder the efficient penetration of analytes during the extraction process. In order to overcome this issue, an applicable strategy called wet electrospinnig has been employed to enlarge the pore size of the electrospun scaffolds. By applying this technique, a collector was placed at the bottom of a solvent bath and highly porous foam from polyamide nanofibers was produced immediately after freeze-drying (3D electrospinning).... 

The purpose of this study was to investigate the experimental and modeling of the drop formation process on calcite rock and calcite aged in nano fluid surfaces in order to analyze size dependent contact angle and wettability modification. To do this, the calcite surfaces were prepared by cutting to an approximately size of 3*3*0.4 cm and grinded and polished to achieve different roughnesses. The purity and roughness of the samples were determined by X-ray diffraction and atomic force microscopy, respectively. In order to conduct the dynamic and static contact angle measurements on the calcite surface in vapor saturated condition, a small laboratory device was designed. The advanced contact... 

The importance of gases and liquids absorption in the liquid falling film is mostly due to the wide applications of liquid falling film reactors in the chemical industries. In such a reactor the mass and heat transfer occur simultaneously, but in most cases, the importance of mass transfer is predominant. Therefore, the study of heat transfer in this kind of reactor is neglected. In order to improve the efficiency of absorption, different methods have been employed by researchers. Owing to the rapid growth of nanotechnology, nanofluids have widely been used for increasing the absorption of solution, recently. Magnetic fluids due to their unique combination, among different kinds of... 

To explain the dependence of sliding friction on or between the layers of wet sand, one first needs to have a rather good understanding of the elastic properties of wet granular material. Experimental work that has been done on the subject so far, has shown that these elastic properties have a peculiar dependence on the water volume fraction of the sand system. But till nowno theoretical model has been presented that could illustrate the physical causes of such findings. More specifically, these handful of theoretical models have not been able to explain the complex relationship between the shear modulus of sand and the water volume percentage. In this thesis at first the nature and... 

The application of wet cooling towers is cooling the circulating water which in many processes extract the exess heat in the system. Any cooling tower involves different parts and one of these parts is packings. The effect of changing packing's charactorizations on the cooling tower's performance is significant and was studied in different researches. In this project the effect of packing roughness on the heat transfer, mass transfer and pressure drop in two arrays of packings and in different conditions of water flow rate, air flow rate and inlet water temperature was studied experimentally. For calculating and investigating the change of mass transfer coefitient, the Poppe model was ... 

Nowadays, cooling towers are widely used in power plants, refineries, petrochemicals and ventilation industries, but the water consumption of these towers is high and because of water crisis in Middle East and Iran, it is necessary to devise in order to reduce the water consumption of these towers. In this study separated hybrid cooling tower are used to investigate the water consumption at power plants. The rigorous Poppe method are used in order to estimate the exact amount of water loss due to evaporation in wet cooling towers. First, the effect of ambient condition, wet cooling tower cells and dry cooling tower size on the performance of hybrid cooling tower are investigated, then the... 

Enzyme immobilization/drying operations are among the important operations of many biotechnological industrial units. The enzyme used in this study is bacterial alpha-amylase, which is widely used in various industries, including detergents. The production of alpha-amylase enzyme contains a large percentage of water in its composition; therefore, a wet wall tower was designed to conduct the experiments to evaporate the water present in the enzyme liquor, analyze its effects on activity, and also to validate the device. The results showed that in a flow of air around 240m3/hr and ambient temperature of 20◦C, enzyme liquor has a 250% increase in biological activity, which indicates the... 

Gas-oil displacement, when stabilized by gravity forces leads to high displacement efficiency, as manifested in high recovery factor associated with gas-cap drive and gravity drainage. The main objective of this research is improved understanding of drainage behavior and changes in flow properties when the importance of viscous, gravity and capillary forces varies. The influence of interplaying between controlling forces on relative permeabilities is also studied. Another objective of this work is to study effect of wettability on recovery under forced gravity drainage. To study drainage behavior under various dominant driving/resistive forces, a number of forced gravity drainage experiments...