Sharif Digital Repository

Despite numerous studies, there is a lack of fundamental understanding about the displacement behavior of surfactant-crude oil systems under the influence of different fractures' geometrical properties in five-spot systems. In this work, a series of flow visualization experiments were carried out on one-quarter five spot glass micromodels at various fractures' geometrical properties, such as fracture density and fracture continuity, under oil-wet condition. The influences of injection of Linear Alkyl Benzene Sulfonate and Sodium Dodecyl Sulfate surfactants as well as the effect of fracture geometrical parameters, on macroscopic and microscopic displacement behavior have been investigated.... 

Surfactant flooding is known to lower the interfacial tension and, hence, reduces capillary forces responsible for trapping oil. Despite numerous experimental studies, little is known about the role of fracture geometrical properties on oil recovery efficiency during surfactant floods, especially in five-spot systems. In addition, application of sodium dodecyl sulfate for oil recovery in fractured media is not discussed well. In this study, two types of surfactant solutions have been injected into micromodels, which were initially saturated with crude oil, having different length, orientation, and distribution of fractures under oil-wet conditions. Precise analyses of continuously recorded... 

In this work, a new type of flooding system, "worm-like micelles", in enhanced heavy oil recovery (EOR) has been introduced. Application of these types of surfactants, because of their intriguing and surprising behaviour, is attractive for EOR studies. Fundamental understanding of the sweep efficiencies as well as displacement mechanisms of this flooding system in heterogeneous systems especially for heavy oils remains a topic of debate in the literature. Worm-like micellar surfactant solutions are made up of highly flexible cylindrical aggregates. Such micellar solutions display high surface activity and high viscoelasticity, making them attractive in practical applications for EOR. In this... 

Spontaneous imbibition of water from fracture into the matrix is considered as one of the most important recovery mechanisms in the fractured porous media. However, water cannot spontaneously imbibe into the oil-wet rocks and as a result oil won't be produced, unless the capillary pressure barrier between fracture conduits and matrix is overcome. Wettability alteration is known as the main affecting mechanism for low salinity water flooding (LSWF), however, its effectiveness in fractured porous media has been less investigated, especially in the case of possible pore scale displacement mechanisms. In this study, the effectiveness of LSWF (diluted seawater) on oil recovery is compared to the... 

We consider the problem of walking in an unknown street, starting from a point s, to reach a target t by a robot which has a minimal sensing capability. The goal is to decrease the traversed path as short as possible. The robot cannot infer any geometric properties of the environment such as coordinates, angles or distances. The robot is equipped with a sensor that can only detect the discontinuities in the depth information (gaps) and can locate the target point as soon as it enters in its visibility region. In addition, a pebble as an identifiable point is available to the robot to mark some position of the street. We offer a data structure similar to Gap Navigation Tree to maintain the... 

Vapour extraction (VAPEX), a newly developed heavy oil recoveiy (HOR) method, has been extensively studied, both theoretically and experimentally, in conventional sandstone models. However, the applicability of this process to naturally fractured reservoirs has not yet been addressed. The objective of this work is to evaluate the effects of fractures' geometrical properties, such as orientation, length of extension, discontinuity in both the upper well region (UWR) and the far well region (FWR) and vertical fracture location on VAPEX performance. Additionally, the effects of horizontal and vertical fracture dispersion in various density, dispersion scheme and networking on the performance of... 

Water flooding is being widely used in the petroleum industry and has been considered as a simple inexpensive secondary recovery method. But in fractured formations, existence of fracture system in reservoir rock induces an adverse effect on oil recovery by water flooding. Polymer flooding has been successfully applied as an alternative enhanced oil recovery method in fractured formations. But, the role of fracture geometrical properties on macroscopic efficiency of polymer flooding is not yet well-understood, especially in fractured five-spot systems. In this work five-spot glass micromodel, because of micro-visibility, ease of multiple experimentations and also presence of the unexplored... 

This work is concerned with the role of geometrical properties of fractures on oil displacement efficiency during solvent injection to heavy oil. Here, a series of solvent injection processes were conducted on one-quarter five-spot fractured micromodels that were initially saturated with the heavy oil, at a fixed flow rate condition. The oil recovery was measured using image analysis of the continuously provided pictures. The results show that for the range of experiments performed here, the maximum oil recovery happens at a fracture orientation angle of 45 degrees. Also, increasing the number of fractures leads to a higher oil recovery factor by solvent in 45 degrees, while it does not... 

We consider the problem of walking a simple robot in an unknown street. The robot that cannot infer any geometric properties of the street traverses the environment to reach a target t, starting from a point s. The robot has a minimal sensing capability that can only report the discontinuities in the depth information (gaps), and location of the target point once it enters in its visibility region. Also, the robot can only move towards the gaps while moving along straight lines is cheap, but rotation is expensive for the robot. We maintain the location of some gaps in a tree data structure of constant size. The tree is dynamically updated during the movement. Using the data structure, we... 

Characterization of viscous fingering in low tension displacements especially for heavy oil surfactant pair in heterogeneous systems is neither straight forward nor well understood. In this work layered porous models containing fractures with different geometrical properties were used and the finger behavior during displacement of LTNS, as a new EOR agent, in heavy oil was quantified. Dynamic propagation of the fingers independent to the type of heterogeneity is well correlated with the dimensionless displacement time in a linearly form. And also, the rate of finger growth is nearly independent to the type of medium heterogeneity. When injection is scheduled through high permeable region in... 

In this paper the behavior of steel pipes, filled and unfilled with concrete, is studied under cyclic shear to examine the possibility of their use as a seismic damper. Two specimens of steel pipes filled inside with concrete are tested under monotonic and cyclic shear. Four other specimens ofbare steel pipes are tested under fully reversed cyclic shear loading. The results show that the bare steel pipes are capable of absorbing a great amount of energy under a severe cyclic shear loading with a stable hysteretic behavior. This behavior is also simulated using the finite element method. Then, parametric studies are performed to investigate the effects of variations in geometrical properties... 

The seismic performance of steel-plate concrete (SC) shear walls is numerically investigated for various SC wall geometrical shapes. Steel faceplates and infill concrete are two main components of SC walls; a full connection between steel and concrete is required for composite action. A comprehensive set of SC wall specimens with different cross-sectional shapes and geometrical properties were tested in the literature for evaluating their seismic behavior. The numerical responses of 17 tested SC walls, including rectangular, T-shaped, and flanged walls, isolated and coupled walls, with and without boundary elements and endplates, subjected to cyclic lateral loading and a wide range of axial... 

Graph based methods are among the most active and applicable approaches studied in semi-supervised learning. The problem of neighborhood graph construction for these methods is addressed in this paper. Neighborhood graph construction plays a key role in the quality of the classification in graph based methods. Several unsupervised graph construction methods have been proposed that have addressed issues such as data noise, geometrical properties of the underlying manifold and graph hyper-parameters selection. In contrast, in order to adapt the graph construction to the given classification task, many of the recent graph construction methods take advantage of the data labels. However, these... 

Various fracture geometrical properties such as orientation, extension, discontinuity, dispersion, location, and networking were investigated. Results indicate improved oil recovery and sweep efficiency in the presence of vertical fractures. Longer vertical fractures seemed to have even more beneficial effects. Horizontal fractures revealed detrimental effects on oil recovery and the performance became worse for longer horizontal fractures. Discontinuous horizontal fractures caused a better performance especially when combined with continuous vertical fractures (networking). Vertical fractures helped the growth of the steam chamber in the vertical direction, which resulted in higher oil... 

Toe to heel air injection has been studied on non-fractured sandstone models and is found to be a promising enhanced oil recovery method for certain heavy oil reservoirs, such as those in Canada, but its applicability on fractured reservoirs, such as those in the Middle East, is not investigated yet. The objective of this article is to evaluate the effect of fractures geometrical parameters, such as fracture density, orientation, and location, on the performance of the process in laboratory scale. Simulation results showed that toe-to-heel air injection is more applicable on highly networked fractured reservoirs, such as those that occur in Persian Gulf coast compared to lower density... 

The aim of the present work is to evaluate the effect of fractures geometrical properties such as orientation, density, location, and networking on the conventional fire flooding (CFF) process performance through simulation analysis. Combustion parameters of a fractured low-permeable carbonate heavy oil reservoir in Iran called Kuh-E-Mond (KEM); applied for simulation study and simulator has been validated with KEM combustion tube experimental data. The validated model was modified to study CFF in 3D semi-scaled combustion cells. Simulation results confirmed that CFF is more feasible in the case of densely fractured reservoirs such as those in the Middle East