Sharif Digital Repository

Recently, wettability alteration has been much attended by researchers for studying well productivity improvement in gas condensate reservoirs. Previous studies in this area only utilized water/alcohol based chemicals for this purpose. While, hydrocarbon nature of the blocked condensate in retrograde gas reservoirs, may motivate application of hydrocarbon based chemical agents. In this study, a new hydrocarbon based wettability modifier is introduced to alter wettability of carbonate and sandstone rocks to preferentially gas wetting condition. Static and dynamic contact angle measurements, spontaneous imbibition and core flooding tests were conducted to investigate the effect of proposed... 

Freshwater scarcity in conjunction with population expansion puts human survival in doubt. Throughout the world, millions of people are deprived of clean and safe drinking water. The development of novel technologies to desalinate water is among the most valuable studies for humanity. Receiving benefits from low energy consumption, high environmental capability, and low-production cost, capacitive deionization (CDI) received significant attention in saline water desalination. Rational design of efficient electrode materials by tailoring their structural and compositional properties, therefore, plays a pivotal role in achieving high-performance CDI systems. Hollow carbon spheres (HCSs) with... 

In the present research, the influence of nanodiamond (ND) and a physical hybrid of ND and fumed nano-SiO2 were investigated on the performance of a typical tire tread compound. The styrene-butadiene rubber (SBR) and cis-butadiene rubber (BR) blend filled with a commercial grade highly dispersive silica at 70 phr loading were used as typical tire tread compound. ND was substituted partially with silica at two different concentrations of 5 and 10phr. Meanwhile, 5 phr of ND/nano-SiO2 hybrids with the weight ratio of 2.5/2.5 and 1/4 were substituted with silica. ND-Filled compounds exhibit increased scorch and cure time compared to controls. Improvement in different characteristics of the... 

Nanoparticulated TiO 2 fibers as one-dimensional long structures were introduced into TiO 2 P25 nanoparticle films using coelectrophoretic deposition. This prevented the usual crack formation occurring in wet coatings, and resulted in less porosity and higher roughness factor of the films that provided more favorable conditions for electron transport. The films used as the photoanode of a dye solar cell (DSC) produced 65% higher photovoltaic efficiency. TiO 2 fibers can be excellent binders in single-step, organic-free electrophoretic deposition of TiO 2 for DSC photoanode  

Three-dimensional (3D) polyamide scaffolds were fabricated by applying a solvent bath as the collecting element. Electrospun nanofibers were immersed into the solvent bath to give a material with a laminated 3D texture. In parallel, 2D nanofibers were synthesized and utilized as microextractive phases in a needle trap device to compare the capabilities of 2D and 3D materials in terms of headspace extraction of various chlorobenzenes (chlorobenzene, 1,2-dichlorobenzene, 1,4-dichlorobenzene, 1,2,4-trichlorobenzene and 1,2,3,4-tetrachlorobenzene). The results demonstrate the superiority of 3D nanofibrous scaffolds over 2D mats. The porosity, morphology, and thermal stability of the 3D scaffolds... 

Stoichiometric hydroxyapatite (HA) powder was synthesized by wet method using orthophosphoric acid and calcium hydroxide, as raw materials. In this regard, the time-depending changes of the precipitated particles and effects of heating on them were investigated. The as-precipitated and heated powder samples were examined using field emission electron microscopy (FESEM), XRD and Raman spectroscopy methods. The results revealed that the morphology and size of the precipitated particles change in each stage of the process. After drying, these nanoparticles tend to form small agglomerates. © 2003 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved  

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... 

Liquid-liquid two-phase flow is capable of boosting heat transfer in microdevices compared to the single-phase and gas-liquid flows. A thorough investigation is performed here to characterize the heat transfer in water-oil flow in a microtube. Finite element method along with the level-set model is employed for numerical simulation. A main part of this paper is devoted to studying the effect of wettability on the heat transfer performance. Four contact angles of 0°, 30°, 150°, and 180° are investigated, which revealed that the contact angle of 150° produces the highest Nusselt number (Nu). Triple points form at this contact angle, and the slugs slide on the wall, which results in more... 

In this research, direct conversion of wet algal biomass into biodiesel using supercritical methanol was studied. In this process, microalgal lipids simultaneously was extracted and converted to biodiesel under high pressure and temperature conditions without using any catalyst. Several experiments have been performed to optimize the methanol amount and it has been revealed that the best performance was achieved by using methanol/wet biomass ratio of 8:1. The effect of using various co-solvents in increasing the efficiency of the supercritical process was investigated. It has been shown that hexane was the most effective co-solvent and its optimal ratio respect to wet biomass was 6:1. The... 

In this paper, a fully coupled thermo-hydro-mechanical model is presented for two-phase fluid flow and heat transfer in fractured/fracturing porous media using the extended finite element method. In the fractured porous medium, the traction, heat, and mass transfer between the fracture space and the surrounding media are coupled. The wetting and nonwetting fluid phases are water and gas, which are assumed to be immiscible, and no phase-change is considered. The system of coupled equations consists of the linear momentum balance of solid phase, wetting and nonwetting fluid continuities, and thermal energy conservation. The main variables used to solve the system of equations are solid phase... 

A new design for heat pump integrated humidification-dehumidification (HDH-HP) desalination cycles was proposed in the current experimental study. An evaporative condenser was designed and fabricated instead of a separate humidifier, heater, and air/water-cooled condensers find in previous HDH-HP systems. Meanwhile, the air dehumidification process in this work directly occurred inside the heat pump evaporator. The effect of several operating parameters such as ambient wet-bulb temperature, spraying saline water and airflow rates, compressor speed, superheat, and evaporator saturation temperature control modes of the electronic expansion valve (EEV) on freshwater production and GOR were... 

Foam flooding has been applied as a promising method in enhanced oil recovery to obviate the challenges of gas flooding such as fingering, channeling and overriding. However, long-term foam stability is crucial for mobility control. In this work, the effective mechanisms on foam stability in the presence of CaCO3 nanoparticles were assessed both theoretically and experimentally. The static and dynamic behaviors of cationic surfactant (HTAB) foam in the presence of CaCO3 nanoparticles with different hydrophobicity were evaluated. The CaCO3 nanoparticles were treated with a series of long-chain fatty acids to generate a range of wettability. Afterward, the underlying mechanisms were revealed... 

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... 

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... 

Two main reservoir mechanisms that impact oil recovery factors are wettability alteration and interfacial tension (IFT) change. In this study, these two key mechanisms are evaluated experimentally for samples from the Asmari (carbonate) oil reservoir utilizing silica nanoparticles in the presence of low-salinity water. The nanofluid, rock formation and crude oil samples were prepared meticulously to ensure meaningful experimental could be conducted over a range of low-salinity conditions. The results show that across the range of salinities studied, the absolute value of zeta potential of nanofluids decreases with increasing total dissolved solids (TDS) in the water treated with silica... 

The use of adjusted/optimized saline water categorized into two different classes namely smart water (SW) and low salinity (LoSal) water injection has been proposed for more oil recovery from specific types of oil reservoirs. There are possible mechanisms concerning SW flooding that have been proposed in the literature, some of them are still subject to more examination. In this study, an experimental investigation is performed to determine the influence of type and amount of salt to the surface properties including interfacial tension (IFT) and contact angle (CA) of aqueous solution + acidic and asphaltenic crude oil + carbonate rock systems. For this purpose, the concentration of different... 

Wettability alteration is the principal low-salinity-effect (LSE) in many oil-brine-rock (OBR) systems. Our recent experimental results have demonstrated that wettability alteration by low salinity is slow. It is expected that the electrical behavior of oil/brine and rock/brine interfaces and the water film geometry control both the transient hydrodynamic pressure, and the time-scale of ionic transport in the film, thus the kinetics and degree of wettability alteration. In this paper, the electro-diffusion process induced by the imposed ionic strength gradient is simulated by solving Poisson-Nernst-Planck equations in a water film bound between two charged surfaces, using a finite... 

Titanium dioxide is a cheap, chemically stable and non-toxic material. However its photocatalytic properties are unstable and it is a modest semiconductor and a mediocre insulator. For several applications it would be interesting to make it either more insulating or more conducting. The goal of this work was to modify the photocatalytic properties of nano-crystalline TiO2 powders by wet chemical routes and hydrothermal methods to understand the mechanism leading to these modifications The principal factors that influence the photocatalytic properties are on the one hand the concentration and nature of the chemical and physical conditions in TiO2, and on the other hand the morphology of the...