Sharif Digital Repository

Microbial Enhanced Oil Recovery (MEOR) as a tertiary process employs microorganisms and their metabolites to reduce the residual oil saturation of the reservoir mainly through interfacial tension (IFT) reduction and wettability alteration. In spite of its great potential and the mentioned advantages, application of MEOR has been limited because of the lack of practical convincing experimental results. In this study, the effects of MEOR process on wettability changes and the reduction of residual oil saturation have been examined by providing microscopic visualization of two phase flow in transparent glass micromodels. Biosurfactant producing bacterial strain (Enterobacter cloacae) was... 

In this study, the impacts of salinity, ion type, and aging process were investigated on coalescence and spreading of crude oil interfaces (including an oil droplet and an oil film) under gravity, through drop rest time measurement techniques, aided by an image analysis system. Three different salt solutions of NaCl, Na2SO4, and MgCl2 were studied at different ionic strengths, ranged from 1% to 150% of Persian Gulf seawater ionic strength. According to the results, aging the oil droplet in the brine increased the interfacial rigidity. Addition of a gas phase - by thinning the surface oil film - almost doubled both rest time and spreading time values. In the aged mode, the presence of salt in... 

The laser powder deposition (LPD) process is an advanced material processing technique with many applications. Despite this fact, reliable and accurate control schemes have not yet been fully developed for the process. In this paper, identification of the LPD process is examined to find a more accurate model to predict and control the height of clad in real time. The model is adaptive single inputsingle output (SISO) and its structure is very similar to the Hammerstein model when the effective power (a function of laser power and velocity) is selected as the input and the clad height as the output. Weighted extended recursive least square (WERLS) is adopted to simultaneously estimate the... 

This paper presents a mathematical model of laser powder deposition (LPD) to predict temperature field, melt pool depth and dilution. The model validated by experiments is developed using the moving heat source method. In this method, the temperature distribution inside the clad and the substrate is obtained using the superposition principle and the solution of the heat diffusion due to a point heat source. The model, which can be used in real-time applications, predicts the melt pool depth and dilution as a function of clad height and clad width, which in practice can be measured by a vision system. Numerical and experimental analyses show a non-linear behaviour of the melt pool depth as a... 

Laser Powder Deposition (LPD) process is an advanced material processing technique which has many applications. Despite this fact, reliable and accurate control schemes have not yet fully developed for the process. In this paper, the problem of controlling the clad height in the LPD process is studied. Due to a faster response of the process to change in scanning velocity over the laser power, the scanning velocity is selected as the input control variable. Since the governing equations of the LPD process are complex for designing a controller, an identified nonlinear dynamic model is used. The model is a Hammerstein model with a linear dynamic and a nonlinear memoryless block. The model... 

Laser Powder Deposition technique is an advanced production method with many applications. Despite this fact, reliable and accurate control schemes have not yet fully developed for this method. This article presents method for in time identification of the process for modeling and adaptation of proper control strategy. ARMAX structure is chosen for system model. Recursive least square method and Kalman Filter methods are adopted for system identification, and their performance are compared. Experimental data was used for system identification, and proper filtering schemes are devised here for noise elimination and increased estimation results. It was concluded that although both methods... 

This study bridges a knowledge gap in oil recovery mechanisms by investigating the influence of water salinity and ion type on oil displacement within porous media, under dynamic flow conditions. Micromodel waterflooding experiments with MgCl2 and Na2SO4 brines at varying ionic strengths (i.e., 0.00832 and 0.832 M), revealed that the high salinity brines considerably boost oil recovery, compared to the low salinity ones. As an instance for MgCl2, the low salinity brine (0.00832 M) resulted in 23% final recovery (one third of which occurred after breakthrough time), while the high salinity one (0.832 M) resulted in 38.5% final recovery (half of which occurred after breakthrough time).... 

In this paper we introduce some general necessary conditions for the existence of graph homomorphisms, which hold in both directed and undirected cases. Our method is a combination of Diaconis and Saloff–Coste comparison technique for Markov chains and a generalization of Haemers interlacing theorem. As some applications, we obtain a necessary condition for the spanning subgraph problem, which also provides a generalization of a theorem of Mohar (1992) as a necessary condition for Hamiltonicity. In particular, in the case that the range is a Cayley graph or an edge-transitive graph, we obtain theorems with a corollary about the existence of homomorphisms to cycles. This, specially, provides... 

In this paper we introduce a chromatic parameter, called the fixing chromatic number, which is related to unique colourability of graphs, in the sense that it measures how one can embed the given graph G in G∪Kt by adding edges between G and Kt to make the whole graph uniquely t-colourable. We study some basic properties of this parameter as well as its relationships to some other well-known chromatic numbers as the acyclic chromatic number. We compute the fixing chromatic number of some graph products by applying a modified version of the exponential graph construction  

In this paper, we apply some new algebraic no-homomorphism theorems in conjunction with some new chromatic parameters to estimate the circular chromatic number of graphs. To show the applicability of the general results, as a couple of examples, we generalize a well known inequality for the fractional chromatic number of graphs and we also show that the circular chromatic number of the graph obtained from the Petersen graph by excluding one vertex is equal to 3. Also, we focus on the Johnson–Holroyd–Stahl conjecture about the circular chromatic number of Kneser graphs and we propose an approach to this conjecture. In this regard, we introduce a new related conjecture on Kneser graphs and we... 

We introduce two necessary conditions for the existence of graph homomorphisms based on the concepts of density and power graph. As corollaries, we obtain a lower bound for the fractional chromatic number, and we set forward elementary proofs of the facts that the circular chromatic number of the Petersen graph is equal to three and the fact that the Coxeter graph is a core  

The effect of temperature on the noncontact atomic force microscopy (NC-AFM) surface imaging is investigated with the aid of molecular dynamics (MD) analysis based on the Sutton-Chen (SC) interatomic potential. Particular attention is devoted to the tip and sample flexibility at different temperatures. When a gold coated probe is brought close to the Au (001) surface at high temperatures, the tip and surface atoms are pulled together and their distance becomes smaller. The tip and sample atoms displacement varies in the different environment temperatures and this leads to the different interaction forces. Along this line, to study the effect of temperature on the resulting images, we have... 

In this paper1 we consider higher isoperimetric numbers of a (finite directed) graph. In this regard we focus on the nth mean isoperimetric constant of a directed graph as the minimum of the mean outgoing normalized flows from a given set of n disjoint subsets of the vertex set of the graph. We show that the second mean isoperimetric constant in this general setting, coincides with (the mean version of) the classical Cheeger constant of the graph, while for the rest of the spectrum we show that there is a fundamental difference between the nth isoperimetric constant and the number obtained by taking the minimum over all n-partitions. In this direction, we show that our definition is the...