Sharif Digital Repository

Fluid flow modeling in porous media has many applications in waste treatment, hydrology and petroleum engineering. In any geological model, flow behavior is controlled by multiple properties. These properties must be known in advance of common flow simulations. When uncertainties are present, deterministic modeling often produces poor results. Percolation and Random Walk (RW) methods have recently been used in flow modeling. Their stochastic basis is useful in dealing with uncertainty problems. They are also useful in finding the relationship between porous media descriptions and flow behavior. This paper employs a simple methodology based on random walk and percolation techniques. The... 

In force gas/oil gravity drainage process in fractured porous media, gas is flowing in both matrix and fractures leading to produce a finite gas pressure gradient. Consequently, viscous force plays an important role for displacing matrix oil toward fractures in addition to gravity force that is required to be modeled appropriately. A new analytical model for estimation of steady state oil saturation distribution with assumption of fixed gas pressure gradient throughout the matrix is presented. Moreover, based on some results of this analytical model a different numerical formulation is developed to predict the performance of oil production process. Comparison of the results obtained from... 

The prediction of flow behavior in porous media can provide useful insights into the mechanisms involved in CO2 sequestration, petroleum engineering and hydrology. The multi-phase flow is usually simulated by solving the governing equations over an efficient model. The geostatistical (or fine grid) models are rarely used for simulation purposes because they have too many cells. A common approach is to coarsen a fine gird realization by an upscaling method. Although upscaling can speed up the flow simulation, it neglects the fine scale heterogeneity. The heterogeneity loss reduces the accuracy of simulation results. In this paper, the relation between heterogeneity loss during upscaling and... 

An upscaling method such as renormalization converts a detailed geological model to a coarse one. Although flow equations can be solved faster on a coarse model, its results have more errors. Numerical dispersion, heterogeneity loss, and connectivity misrepresentation are the factors responsible for errors. Connectivity has a great effect on the fluid distribution and leakage pathways in EOR processes or CO2 storage. This paper deals with the description and quantification of connectivity misrepresentation in the upscaling process. For detection of high-flow regions, the flow equations are solved under simplified single-phase conditions. These regions are recognized as the cells whose fluxes... 

The connectivity between two points in porous media is important for evaluating hydrocarbon recovery in underground reservoirs or toxic migration in waste disposal. For example, the connectivity between a producer and an injector in a hydrocarbon reservoir impact the fluid dispersion throughout the system. The conventional approach, flow simulation, is computationally very expensive and time consuming. Alternative method employs percolation theory. Classical percolation approach investigates the connectivity between two lines (representing the wells) in 2D cross sectional models whereas we look for the connectivity between two points (representing the wells) in 2D aerial models. In this... 

Asphaltene instability is one of the major problems in gas injection projects throughout the world. Numerous models have been developed to predict asphaltene precipitation; The scaling equation is an attractive tool because of its simplicity and not involving complex properties of asphaltene. In this work, a new scaling model is presented to account for asphaltene precipitation due to gas injection at reservoir conditions. Extensive published data from literature have been used in model preparation. To check predictive capability of the equation, miscible gas injection experiments are conducted for a southwest Iranian oil reservoir. Experimental results show that methane injection has... 

Enhanced Oil Recovery from carbonate reservoirs is a major challenge especially in naturally fractured formations where spontaneous imbibition is a main driving force. The Low Salinity Water Injection (LSWI) method has been suggested as one of the promising methods for enhanced oil recovery. However, the literature suggests that LSWI method, due to high dependence on rock mineralogy, injected and formation water salt concentration, and complexity of reactions is not a well-established technology in oil recovery from carbonate reservoirs. The underlying mechanism of LSWI is still not fully understood. Due to lack of LSWI study in free clay dolomite fractured reservoir, and to investigate of... 

This paper studies the real-time energy management of large-scale residential households and standalone electric vehicles charging stations using a non-cooperative game based on consensus protocol. We consider a set of aggregators, each equipped with a processor, to minimize its own cost function by having access to the local estimation terms of neighboring aggregators. Since the cost function of each aggregator is affected by strategy of other aggregators through total generation cost, such interaction among competitive agents is modeled as a non-cooperative game. An idea based on model predictive control is utilized to deal with highly random behavior of users. In this paper, a time-of-use... 

Ionic liquids are a significant type of organic salts with attractive and superior physicochemical features for employing in a number of chemical processes. Ionic liquids include one large and asymmetric cationic or anionic functional group. The properties of cationic functional group are almost similar and it is main motivation of this study. In the present investigation, we extended various semi-empirical correlations to predict some temperature-based properties of ionic liquids mixture (IL-mixture). These properties are density, viscosity, surface tension and bubble point pressure. In the case of IL-mixture density, modified Rackett equation and Taylor equation with three scenarios,... 

In this study ethanol was produced without using expensive commercial enzymes from sugarcane bagasse. Alkali pretreatment was used to prepare biomass before enzymatic hydrolysis. The comparison between NaOH, KOH and Ca(OH)2 revealed that NaOH has been more effective on bagasse structure. The required enzymes for biomass hydrolysis were produced by bagasse solid state fermentation using three fungi: Trichoderma longibrachiatum, T. reesei and Aspergillus niger. Results indicated enzyme solution produced by A. niger has functioned better than the other two in cellulose conversion during sole hydrolysis. Ethanol was produced by simultaneous saccharification and fermentation (SSF) with on-site... 

As a cost-effective and reliable alternative to supply remote areas, standalone hybrid energy systems (HESs) are recently under investigation to address various concerns associated with technical, financial, and environmental issues. This paper presents a comprehensive algorithm that can simultaneously optimize the component size, operation strategy, and slope of the photovoltaic panels of a standalone HES using an improved variant of particle swarm optimization (PSO), designated as the passive congregation PSO. A new operation strategy is proposed based on the set points of the control system. The optimization algorithm determines the optimal values of the set points to efficiently optimize... 

A comprehensive study is performed to investigate the performance of a non-uniform circular array interferometer in a real time 3-dimensional direction finder. The angular range of view is supposed to be 65 degrees vertically and 120 degrees horizontally, which is suitable for airborne applications. Interferometer is designed to work in the S, C and X bands. Regarding optimization process, the interferometer employs an eight element non-uniform circular array along with a phase reference antenna at the center of the array. Several quantities and parameters are studied, e.g., frequency behavior, origins of phase measurement errors, Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR) effect on phase measurement, and...