Sharif Digital Repository

A new and general procedure for history matching that uses streamline simulation and a gradual deformation technique has been proposed. Streamline trajectories define the major flow paths and help the algorithm to modify the reservoir model only in the regions that cause the mismatch between simulation results and field observations. The use of a gradual deformation technique enables the algorithm to remain constrained to reservoir geostatistics. It also reduces the number of independent variables in the optimization problem. In our algorithm, effective conductivities are defined along each streamline. The effective streamline conductivities are then adjusted using the values of measured and... 

Titanium carbonated hydroxyapatite (Ti/CHA) nanobiocomposites have extensive biological applications due to the excellent biocompatibility and similar characteristics to the human bone. Ti/CHA nanobiocomposite has good biological properties but it suffer from diverse characteristics especially in hardness, Young's modulus, apparent porosity and relative density. This investigation is an attempt to propose the predictive models using gene expression programming (GEP) to estimate these characteristics. In this regards, GEP is used to model and compare the effect of practical variables including pressure, Ti/CHA contents and sintering temperature on their monitored properties. To achieve this... 

Sedimentation of particles can undermine the uniformity of the product in the manufacture of the particle-filled composites. An adequate mathematical description of the sedimentation process could be helpful for providing necessary information concerning the dominant parameters and can give an insight for the process designer to prevent such an undesirable phenomenon in composite production. The present article deals with the mathematical modeling of settling particles during curing of polymer matrix composites. The sedimentation process is described by the mass conservation law for particles. Since the viscosity of the suspending polymer increases as a result of curing process, a new model... 

Numerical simulation of resin transfer molding (RTM) is known as a useful method to analyze the process before the mold is actually built. In thick parts, the resin flow is no longer two-dimensional and must be simulated in a fully three-dimensional space. This article presents numerical simulations of three-dimensional non-isothermal mold filling of the RTM process. The control volume/finite element method (CV/FEM) is used in this study. Numerical formulation for resin flow is based on the concept of nodal partial saturation at the flow front. This approach permits to include a transient term in the working equation, removing the need for calculation of time step to track the flow front in... 

A process cycle of resin transfer molding (RTM) consists of two sequential stages, i.e. filling and curing stages. These two stages are interrelated in non-isothermal processes so that the curing stage is dominated by the resin flow as well as temperature and conversion distributions during the filling stage. Therefore, it is necessary to take into account both filling and curing stages to analyze the process cycle accurately. In this paper, a full three-dimensional process cycle simulation of RTM is performed. Full three-dimensional analysis is necessary for thick parts or parts having complex shape. A computer code is developed based on the control volume/finite element method (CV/FEM).... 

The petroleum industry tends to paint an optimistic picture with respect to future petroleum availability. In order to anticipate demand, the size of connected volume of hydrocarbon of fields needs to be known. During the early stage of life of a reservoir, due to the lake of certain data, connected volume of hydrocarbon is usually based on analogues or rules of thumb and not detailed reservoir modeling. Therefore, there is a great incentive to produce physically-based methodologies to make an estimation of connected volume of hydrocarbon. Percolation theory is used to estimate the connected volume of hydrocarbon very fast. Furthermore, the result has been validated against areal field... 

Reservoir characterization, especially during early stages of reservoir life, is very uncertain, due to the scarcity of data. Reservoir connectivity and permeability evaluation is of great importance in reservoir characterization. The conventional approach to addressing this is computationally very expensive and time consuming. Therefore, there is a great incentive to produce much simpler alternative methods. In this paper, we use a statistical approach called the percolation theory, which considers a hypothesis wherein the reservoir can be split into either permeable (i.e. sand/fracture) or impermeable flow units (i.e. shale/matrix), and assumes that the connectivity of permeability... 

The connectivity of high conductivity pathways in geological formations depend on the spatial distribution of geological heterogeneities that may appear on various length scales. Appropriate modeling of this is crucial within in hydrology and petroleum systems. The approach taken in this study is to use percolation theory to quantify the connectivity, hydraulic conductivity, and breakthrough time behavior between an injector and a producer within such systems. In particular, a three-dimensional overlapping sandbody model is considered which assumes that the geological formation can be split into either conductive flow units (i. e., good sands) or non-conductive units (i. e., poor sands). The... 

Oil reservoirs are very complex with geological heterogeneities that appear on all scales. Proper modeling of the spatial distribution of these heterogeneities is crucial, affecting all aspects of flow and, consequently, the reservoir performance. Reservoir connectivity and conductivity evaluation is of great importance for decision-making on various possible development scenarios including infill drilling projects. This can be addressed by using the percolation theory approach. This statistical approach considers a hypothesis that the reservoir can be split into either permeable (good sands) or impermeable flow units (poor sands) and assumes that the continuity of permeability contrasts... 

The connectivity of high conductivity pathways in geological formations depend on the spatial distribution of geological heterogeneities that may appear on various length scales. Appropriate modeling of this is crucial within in hydrology and petroleum systems. The approach taken in this study is to use percolation theory to quantify the connectivity, hydraulic conductivity, and breakthrough time behavior between an injector and a producer within such systems. In particular, a three-dimensional overlapping sandbody model is considered which assumes that the geological formation can be split into either conductive flow units (i. e., good sands) or non-conductive units (i. e., poor sands). The... 

Reservoir characterization, especially during early stages of reservoir life, is very uncertain, due to the scarcity of data. Reservoir connectivity and permeability evaluation is of great importance in reservoir characterization. The conventional approach to addressing this is computationally very expensive and time consuming. Therefore, there is a great incentive to produce much simpler alternative methods. In this paper, we use a statistical approach called the percolation theory, which considers a hypothesis wherein the reservoir can be split into either permeable (i.e. sand/fracture) or impermeable flow units (i.e. shale/matrix), and assumes that the connectivity of permeability... 

We investigate the effects of anisotropy on the finite-size scaling of connectivity and conductivity of continuum percolation in three dimensions. We consider a system of size X×Y×Z in which cubic bodies of size a×b×c are placed randomly. We define two aspect ratios to request anisotropy then we expect that the displacement of average connected fraction P (averaged over the realizations), about the isotropic universal curves will be a function of the two aspect ratios. This is accounted by considering an apparent percolation threshold in each direction which leads to 50% of realizations connecting in that direction. We find the aspect ratios' dependency of the apparent threshold and... 

Objective(s): Seizure detection during online recording of electrophysiological parameters is very important in epileptic patients. In the present study, online analysis of field potential recordings was used for detecting spontaneous seizures in epileptic animals. Materials and Methods: Epilepsy was induced in rats by pilocarpine injection. During the chronic period of the pilocarpine model, local field potential (LFP) recording was run for at least 24 hr. At the same time, video monitoring of the animals was done to determine the real time of seizure occurrence. Both power and sample entropy of LFP were used for online analysis. Results: Obtained results showed that changes in LFP power... 

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,... 

Effect of organoclay (OC) on the performance of styrene-butadiene rubber (SBR)/phenolic resin (PH) blend prepared by two-roll mill was investigated. The influence of OC content ranging between 2.5 and 30 phr on the performance of SBR/PH was investigated using X-ray diffraction (XRD), scanning electron microscopy (SEM), interfacial energy analysis, tensile, dynamic mechanical, swelling, cure rheometry and thermogravimetric analysis (TGA). It was found that the OC is mainly localized in the SBR phase of SBR/PH blend through the kinetically favored mechanism relevant to rubber chains. The results also demonstrated the positive role of PH on the dispersion of OC. Both PH and OC showed... 

The present study deals with the structure-property relationship of organoclay (OC) filled nanocomposites based on rubber blend comprising of nitrile-butadiene rubber (NBR) and phenolic resin (PH). To obtain a better insight into the characteristics of the NBR/PH/OC hybrid system, a simple model system consisting of NBR/OC nanocomposites is also taken into consideration. A series of NBR/OC and NBR/PH/OC nanocomposites containing a wide range of OC concentrations (2.5-30 phr) are prepared by using traditional open two-roll mill. Structural analysis performed by X-ray diffraction (XRD), scanning electron microscope (SEM), and transmission electron microscope (TEM) exhibits mixed exfoliated and... 

Various compositions of maleated ethylene-propylene-rubber (EPR-g-MA) toughened polyamide 6 without and with short glass fiber, i.e. 5-20 wt.% rubber and 5-20 wt.% fiber, are prepared using an industrial twin-screw extruder at different levels of feed rate (100-250 kg/h), screw speed (200-450 rpm) and barrel temperature (230-260 °C). Trial runs designed based on the Taguchi's orthogonal arrays are subjected to tensile, impact, scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and optical microscopy tests; and the results are used to perform the analysis of variance (ANOVA). It is shown that the rubber particle size decreases significantly by increasing the rubber content for the unreinforced blend. The... 

X-ray diffraction and rheological measurements were used to characterize nanoparticle dispersion in LDPE/LLDPE/nanoclay hybrid nanocomposites. XRD patterns were interpreted with a novel distribution formula and rheological measurements were used to confirm the results. Results of these two methods indicated that increasing clay in all the prepared nanocomposites exhibited a significant improvement in filler-matrix interaction because of increasing the probability of polymer diffusion but further exfoliation need more compatibilizing situations. It seems that this mathematical method could be used for predicting the overall change in clay gallery d-spacing and the extent of... 

The present paper demonstrates the performance of the radiation grafting technique as a chemically based surface pretreatment method to adhesion modification of polyethylene surfaces toward the metallic layer. Gamma irradiation over a dose range of 4-10 kGy is used for grafting of vinyl monomers including acrylamide (AAm) and 1-vinyl-2-pyrrolidone (NVP) onto the surface of three different polyethylenes including low density polyethylene (LDPE) and two kinds of high density polyethylenes, namely HDPE-1 and HDPE-2. The grafting yield is evaluated based on the weight increase of the samples. It is found that the grafting yield is dominated by the crystallinity of the polyethylene, so that lower... 

316L stainless steel is widely used as cathode blank in copper electrorefining. These cathode blanks become distorted through the cathode stripping in the cathode stripping machine and must be straightened before using again. After several times repeated cold straightening, the cathode blank spring backs to its distorted position during electrorefining resulted in short circuits and current efficiency decreases. The objectives of this study were to: i) investigate the cathode blank spring back behavior and properties; ii) propose a solution adhere to the subject. To achieve these goals, more than 20 samples are selected and cut into small pieces to simulate the cold straightening process....