Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Chemical Engineering
A Novel Methodology to Map Hydrogen Storage Potential in Salt Caverns: A Case Study of the Midwestern and Appalachian Regions of the United States
Published: 2024-10-24
Subjects: Chemical Engineering, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Geophysics and Seismology, Sustainability
Hydrogen is widely understood to be critical for decarbonizing hard-to-abate sectors like heavy industry, and long-distance transportation as well as balancing a variable renewable energy dominated power grid. Here, we propose a methodology for evaluating the potential for hydrogen storage in geological salt resources. This methodology starts with a characterization of salt resources by [...]
Resilient foods for preventing global famine: a review of food supply interventions for global catastrophic food shocks including nuclear winter and infrastructure collapse
Published: 2024-09-12
Subjects: Agricultural Science, Agriculture, Animal Sciences, Aquaculture and Fisheries Life Sciences, Chemical Engineering, Engineering, Food Science, Life Sciences, Plant Sciences, Risk Analysis
Global catastrophic threats to the food system upon which human society depends are numerous. A nuclear war or volcanic eruption could collapse agricultural yields by inhibiting crop growth. Nuclear electromagnetic pulses or extreme pandemics could disrupt industry and mass-scale food supply by unprecedented levels. Global food storage is limited. What can be done? This article presents the state [...]
Rapid Fault Leakage Modeling for CO2 Storage in Saline Aquifers
Published: 2024-08-12
Subjects: Chemical Engineering, Earth Sciences, Engineering, Geology, Petroleum Engineering, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Risk Analysis
Simulating the fluid flow along fault zones at different scales is essential for predicting the CO2 leakage and containment during injection and storage. However, this can be challenging, especially in the early stages of a storage project when knowledge of the reservoir and caprock is limited and the cost of obtaining the relevant data is high. This study proposes a tool for fast screening of [...]
Multicomponent and multiphase CO2-brine system in microfluidic characterised in situ by Raman spectroscopy
Published: 2024-06-07
Subjects: Chemical Engineering, Complex Fluids, Mining Engineering, Petroleum Engineering
Deep-saline aquifers could be instrumental in the geological storage of carbon dioxide due to their relatively good reservoir properties, high volume, and prevalence. However, there are a few difficulties which should be overcome to obtain effective stores in such reservoirs. Most problems are related to formation damage caused by salt precipitation. Due to the complexity of such systems, it is [...]
Fiber-based super-bridging agents improve flotation and settling during water treatment
Published: 2024-03-07
Subjects: Chemical Engineering, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Engineering
Increasing demand for water poses a major challenge to the water treatment industry. To maintain their floc removal efficiency, water treatment plants are expected to require larger separation units and use more chemicals, namely, coagulants and flocculants. Conventional physicochemical treatments produce flocs that are limited in size, which limits floc removal efficiency via gravitation-based [...]
Experimental and Numerical Description of Mineral Precipitation Dynamics on Heterogeneous Substrate Surfaces
Published: 2023-12-07
Subjects: Chemical Engineering, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences
Mineral precipitation reactions are critical in reactive transport studies of porous media due to their significant impacts on flow and transport properties. Understanding the nucleation process, a probabilistic phenomenon that determines the location and distribution of solid formation in space and time domains, is essential for accurately comprehending the effect of mineral precipitation on [...]
Isotopically labeled ozone: a new approach to elucidate the formation of ozonation products
Published: 2022-09-06
Subjects: Chemical Engineering, Chemistry, Engineering, Environmental Sciences
As ozonation becomes a widespread treatment for removal of chemicals of emerging concern in wastewater treatment plant effluents, there are increasing concerns regarding the formation of ozonation products (OPs), and their possible impacts on the aquatic environment and eventually human health. In this study, a novel method was developed that utilizes heavy oxygen (18O2) for the production of [...]
Fluid invasion dynamics in porous media with complex wettability and connectivity
Published: 2021-06-17
Subjects: Chemical Engineering, Complex Fluids, Earth Sciences, Fluid Dynamics, Hydrology, Materials Science and Engineering, Other Materials Science and Engineering, Petroleum Engineering, Transport Phenomena
Multiphase flow is important for many natural and engineered processes in subsurface geoscience. Pore-scale multiphase flow dynamics are commonly characterized by an average balance of driving forces. However, significant local variability in this balance may exist inside natural, heterogeneous porous materials, such as rocks and soils. Here, we investigate multiphase flow in heterogeneous rocks [...]
Evaluating the Economic Fairways for Hydrogen Production in Australia
Published: 2021-05-20
Subjects: Chemical Engineering, Natural Resource Economics, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Physical and Environmental Geography, Power and Energy, Water Resource Management
Assessments of hydrogen project viability typically focus on evaluating specific sites for development, or providing generic cost-estimates that are independent of location. In reality, the success of hydrogen projects will be intimately linked to the availability of local energy resources, access to key infrastructure and water supplies, and the distance to export ports and energy markets. In [...]
CO2 capture by pumping surface acidity to the deep ocean
Published: 2021-04-30
Subjects: Chemical Engineering, Climate, Engineering, Environmental Engineering, Oceanography, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
The majority of IPCC scenarios call for active CO2 removal (CDR) to remain below 2oC of warm- ing. On geological timescales, ocean uptake regulates atmospheric CO2 concentration, with two homeostats driving CO2 uptake: dissolution of deep ocean calcite deposits and terrestrial weathering of silicate rocks, acting on 1ka to 100ka timescales, respectively. Many current ocean-based CDR proposals [...]
Three Common Statistical Missteps We Make in Reservoir Characterization
Published: 2020-05-11
Subjects: Chemical Engineering, Earth Sciences, Engineering, Geology, Petroleum Engineering, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Statistical Methodology, Statistics and Probability
Reservoir characterization analysis resulting from incorrect applications of statistics can be found in the literature, particularly in applications where integration of various disciplines is needed. Here, we look at three misapplications of ordinary least squares linear regression (LSLR) and show how they can lead to poor results and offer better alternatives, where available. The issues are [...]
A mixed $RT_0 - P_0$ Raviart-Thomas finite element implementation of Darcy Equation in GNU Octave
Published: 2020-04-13
Subjects: Applied Mathematics, Bioresource and Agricultural Engineering, Chemical Engineering, Computational Engineering, Earth Sciences, Engineering, Environmental Sciences, Hydrology, Numerical Analysis and Computation, Partial Differential Equations, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Water Resource Management
In this paper we shall describe mixed formulations -differential and variational- of Darcys flow equation, an important model of elliptic problem. We describe * Galerkin method with finite dimensional spaces; * Local matrices and assembling; * Raviart-Thomas $RT_0 - P_0$ elements; * Edge basis and local matrices for $RT_0 - P_0$ FEM; * Model problem with corresponding local matrices, right hand [...]
Comparison of permeability predictions on cemented sandstones with physics-based and machine learning approaches
Published: 2020-02-06
Subjects: Chemical Engineering, Earth Sciences, Engineering, Hydrology, Multivariate Analysis, Petroleum Engineering, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Statistics and Probability
Permeability prediction has been an important problem since the time of Darcy. Most approaches to solve this problem have used either idealized physical models or empirical relations. In recent years, machine learning (ML) has led to more accurate and robust, but less interpretable empirical models. Using 211 core samples collected from 12 wells in the Garn Sandstone from the North Sea, this [...]
Fluid surface coverage showing the controls of rock mineralogy on the wetting state
Published: 2019-12-13
Subjects: Chemical Engineering, Earth Sciences, Engineering, Petroleum Engineering, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
The wetting state is an important control on flow in subsurface multi fluid phase systems, e.g., carbon storage and oil production. Advances in X-ray imaging allow us to characterise the wetting state using imagery of fluid arrangement within the pores of rocks. We derived a model from equilibrium thermodynamics relating fluid coverage of rock surfaces to wettability and fluid saturation. The [...]
Dynamic modelling of overprinted impermeable fault gouges and surrounding damage zones as lower dimensional interfaces
Published: 2019-11-14
Subjects: Chemical Engineering, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Computational Engineering, Engineering, Petroleum Engineering
In the modelling of subsurface fluid flow, faults are dominant features since they can act as fluid pathways or barriers. Special emphasis is therefore placed in representing them in a numerically efficient manner and the use of lower dimensional domains has become prevalent to simulate higher permeability features like fractures. Such features, however, only represent some of the components of [...]