Sharif Digital Repository

Fluid flow in porous media is affected by surface characteristics such as roughness and topography. In this work, to simulate the surface of natural porous structures in transparent interconnected media like micromodels, various degrees of roughness have been artificially created on flat glass substrates via different methods of laser ablation, cream etching, combination of laser ablation and cream etching, and hydrofluoric acid (HF) etching. The obtained surfaces by each method were characterized in detail via field emission scanning electron microscopy (FESEM), atomic force microscopy (AFM), energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDX/EDS), and surface profilometry. The impact of high... 

The purpose of this study was the production of copolymers and terpolymers with highly hydrophilic–hydrophobic properties, using inexpensive and available monomers as potential enhancing oil recovery (EOR) and water production control agents for high-temperature and high-salinity (HTHS) oil reservoirs. For this purpose, several copolymers and terpolymers with different molar percentage of acrylamide/styrene, acrylamide/maleic anhydride, and acrylamide/styrene/maleic anhydride were synthesized by the inverse emulsion polymerization technique. The presence of hydrophobic styrene and hydrophilic maleic anhydride monomers in the copolymer and terpolymer structure, provided some unique properties... 

According to the great potential of zero-valent iron nanoparticle applications in the environmental, medical, chemical, packaging and many other industries, there is still a need to tailor their production methods. This study reports the production of a hybrid nanostructure based on iron nanoparticles (INPs) produced in/on montmorillonite (MMT) nanoclays as an oxygen scavenger and barrier additive in polymeric packaging materials of oxygen-sensitive products. INPs and MMT were demonstrated to have effective mutual interactions in which the MMT host played a chemophysical trapping role for iron particles, causing smaller particles around 10 nm with 6.2 g/m2 higher specific surface area by... 

In this work, polyolefin-blend/clay nanocomposites based on low-density polyethylene (LDPE), linear low-density polyethylene (LLDPE), and organically modified clay (OC) were prepared by melt extrusion. Various grades of maleic anhydride (MA) grafted polyethylene (PE-g-MA) were used and examined as compatibilizers in these nanocomposites. Differential scanning calorimetry analysis showed that OC and compatibilizer affect the crystallization behavior of LDPE/LLDPE with different mechanisms. Thermodynamic calculations of wetting coefficient based on interfacial energy between OC, LD, and LL, Morphological characterization based on field emission scanning electron microscopy, X-ray diffraction,... 

A wide range of enhanced oil recovery (EOR) methods has been proposed to accelerate the recovery of remaining oil in subsurface reservoirs. One important class of methods is water-based chemical EOR (CEOR). The existing screening workflows for CEOR assessment and selection for a particular field focus primarily on the subsurface performance evaluation while a holistic, full-cycle assessment that considers all surface and subsurface challenges is missing. Some of the pre-injection/injection challenges of a CEOR method are the high cost of chemicals, preparation, transportation, storage, scaling, corrosion, and low injectivity. Some of the production/post-production issues include... 

In this paper, the performance of three imidazolium-based ionic liquids (ILs) including 1-hexyl-3-methylimidazolium chloride ([HMIM][Cl] or IL6), 1-octyl-3-methylimidazolium chloride ([OMIM][Cl] or IL8), and 1- dodecyl-3-methylimidazolium chloride ([DMIM][Cl] or IL12) in reducing the interfacial tension (IFT) between crude oil and IL solutions was analyzed for the first time under a wide range of salinities (1000 to 195 476 ppm) at a reservoir temperature of 80 °C. The purpose was to microscopically analyze the occurring phenomenon at the fluid-fluid interface to determine the mechanism leading to oil extraction and to address the existing ambiguities in the literature concerning the... 

With the development of modern sports, the design and production of sportswear play an essential role, especially in many modern difficult and dangerous sports. Selection of fibre fabrics is the most important factor because this influences the performance and efficiency, while ensuring protection and physical comfort. In recent years, the demand for smart materials and textiles has been increasing all around the world. Many investigations have been carried out into developing smart textiles that support the better performance of athletes. A smart textile is an intelligent system that is able to sense environmental conditions and electrical, thermal, mechanical, chemical, and magnetic... 

Amphiphilic copolymers consist of hydrophilic and hydrophobic monomer units have attracted great technological attention recently, owing to their unique properties and their ability to stabilize various interfaces in aqueous systems. This paper presents a novel and facile approach to produce spherical polyacrylamide, polystyrene and hydrophobically modified polyacrylamide (HM-PAM), as one of the most important type of amphiphilic copolymers, using a continuous aerosol-photopolymerization for the first time. To this end, the monomer droplets were generated by an atomizer, then photopolymerization was initiated ‘‘in flight’’ by ultraviolet (UV) irradiation of the aerosol monomer droplets... 

The authors carried out the study to prepare chitosan N-isopropylacrylamide hydrogel via heating and radiation processes. Properties investigation of prepared samples revealed that radiation prepared samples show higher yield and swelling ratios in comparison with the heating prepared ones. Effects of hydrogel addition to drilling mud on its important rheological properties such as apparent viscosity, plastic viscosity, and stress-strain behavior are measured. The rheological properties of hydrogel were compared with cellulosemethylcarboxyl and resins that are widely used in drilling fluid. The results demonstrate that whereas linear polymer effects on mud properties are more significant in... 

This study presents economic and formation investigations on hydration effects by looking at natural gas hydrate (NGH) storage and transportation processes and formation conditions. The investigation includes experiments with methane. The obtained results show that the methane formation time increased linearly as the subcooling temperature decreased. Furthermore, the economic result indicates that the energy consumption parameter is appropriate for examining resource consumption for a system that, in turn, results in optimal capital investment through the storage and transportation process of NGH. The results also show that energy consumption increases logarithmically as the hydrate... 

In this work, a fundamental kinetic model based upon the Hougen-Watson non-porosity formalism was derived and used to simulate dehydrogenation and oxidation axial flow reactors. In addition, partial pressure profiles of components during styrene production process inside porous catalyst were obtained using Dusty-Gas model. The preservation equations are adopted to calculate temperature and flow profiles in the reactors filled with iron-potassium promoted catalyst pellets. The presented mathematical model for ethylbenzene dehydrogenation consists of nonlinear simultaneous differential equations with multiple dependent variables. Simulation results such as selectivity and operating temperature... 

High molecular weight polyacrylamide (PAM) nanoparticle dispersions are products with wide application possibilities, the most important of which is in petroleum industry such as drilling fluid and flooding agent in enhanced oil recovery. For that aim, it is necessary to achieve complete control of the final dispersion and polymer properties during the synthesis step. In this work, PAMs were synthesized by inverse emulsion polymerization of aqueous acrylamide solution in cyclohexane in the presence of emulsifier mixture of Span 20 and Span 80. We present a comprehensive study of the effects of variation of all important reaction conditions (agitation rate, reaction time and temperature,... 

Referring to importance of the oil/water separation as one of the main challenges in the environmental conditions, numerous researches in the superhydrophobic/superoleophilic materials especially in the industrial oily wastewater treatment have been focused. In this study, the commercial polyurethane (PU) sponge was dip-coated by zinc stearate (Zn(St)2) particles and a novel adhesive of hexamethylenetetramine (HMTA) cured phenol-formaldehyde resin (PFR). For this purpose, a design of experiment (DOE) was applied to statistically specify the effect of important process variables on the final product properties. The second-order central composite design (CCD) approach based on the response... 

The chemical, thermal, and mechanical degradation of polymer chains under high salinity, temperature, and shear rates in oil reservoirs are the current challenges of the polymer flooding process. To answer such a complex requirement, recently, acrylamide (AM)-based thermoassociating graft copolymers (TAP) were synthesized that presented excellent performance as a viscosity enhancer, especially under high temperature and salinity conditions. The purpose of this study was to further investigate the effect of salinity, shear rate, mechanical strength, and adsorption of these TAPs on viscosity-enhancing performance at different temperatures. Finally, the performance of the TAPs was studied in... 

Over the last decades, several approaches have been proposed in the literature to incorporate users' perceptions of travel costs, their bounded rationality, and risk-taking behaviors into network equilibrium modeling for traffic assignment problem. While theoretically advanced, these models often suffer from high complexity and computational cost and often involve parameters that are difficult to estimate. This study proposes an alternative approach where users' imprecise perceptions of travel times are endogenously constructed as fuzzy sets based on the probability distributions of random link travel times. Two decision rules are proposed accordingly to account for users' heterogeneous... 

With the decline in oil discoveries over recent decades, it is believed that enhanced oil recovery (EOR) technologies will play a key role to meet energy demand in the coming years. Polymer flooding is used commonly worldwide as an EOR process. In this work, we propose the synthesis of protected polyacrylamide (PAM) nanoparticles (PPNs) with a hydrophobic polystyrene (PSt) shell by one-pot two-step inverse emulsion polymerization, in which the PSt shell was created by surface polymerization. The shell protects the active PAM chains from premature degradation caused by the harsh environment in the reservoirs, controls the release of the chains as rheological modifiers, and additionally, it... 

Abstract original image Smart Enhanced Oil Recovery Process using Core–Shell Nanoparticles: The cover image denotes schematically the enhanced oil recovery process by flooding using an aqueous dispersion of core–shell nanoparticles made up of protected polyacrylamide nanostructures (PPNs). Y. Tamsilian and his colleagues at Sharif University of Technology (Iran) and the Institute for Polymer Material (POLYMAT, Spain) demonstrated the synthesis of polyacrylamide nanoparticles protected with a hydrophobic polystyrene shell by using a one-pot, two-step inverse emulsion polymerization technique, where the polystyrene shell was created by surface polymerization. The presence of the hydrophobic...