Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Engineering
Explicit Structural Modeling of Geological Horizons Near Fault Networks
Published: 2026-08-20
Subjects: Engineering, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
This article extends the approach of constructing a geological horizon surface near a single tectonic fault to the case of a system of arbitrary, including intersecting, faults. The generalization requires solving four subtasks: formalization of the fault system as a simplicial complex, construction of the modeling domain as a gamma-neighborhood of the cut graph on the triangulation, replacement [...]
What Can We Learn from a Reduced-Dimensional Groundwater Representation for Diagnosing Groundwater–Land Interactions? Insights from the Water Table Ratio
Published: 2026-08-20
Subjects: Engineering, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Groundwater exerts an important control on land–atmosphere interactions, yet its explicit representation in Earth system models remains computationally prohibitive. Reduced-dimensional metrics, such as the Water Table Ratio (WTR), have been proposed to represent groundwater influences on land–atmosphere interactions. However, their uncertainty, classification stability, and correspondence with [...]
Coupling Chemistry and Machine Learning Across the Lithium Supply Chain: Resource Geochemistry, Extraction, Separation, and Recycling
Published: 2026-08-20
Subjects: Engineering
Lithium supply must expand sharply over the coming decades to support the electrification of transport and the growth of stationary energy storage. At almost every stage the governing chemical challenge is the same: concentrating and separating Li⁺ from chemically similar competing ions at acceptable economic and environmental cost. This review examines the supply chain through two interconnected [...]
Field-scale sugarcane mapping in Thailand by fusing annual satellite embeddings with a global field-boundary model, cross-checked against mill weighbridge records
Published: 2026-08-15
Subjects: Computer and Systems Architecture, Computer Engineering, Engineering
Sugarcane in Thailand is grown almost entirely by smallholders who deliver to mills under seasonal contracts, so the quantities that matter to planning are properties of individual fields rather than of pixels. Published Thai cane maps are per-pixel classifications, and global cane products perform markedly worse in Thailand than elsewhere because cane is confused with cassava. Whether the global [...]
The Coastal Resilience Safety Factor: A General Method for Coastal Design Under Deep Uncertainty, with a Vancouver Application
Published: 2026-08-15
Subjects: Engineering, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Global sea level rise is accelerating, and a substantial portion of the coming rise is now committed regardless of future emissions; coastal cities must therefore shift from preventing the hazard to designing for it. That shift poses a question every other safety-critical discipline already answers in its own domain: how large a design margin a structure should carry when the load is deeply [...]
Earth Embedding Products for Geospatial Analysis: Foundations, Applications, and Open Challenges
Published: 2026-08-13
Subjects: Engineering
Earth observation satellites generate petabytes of imagery each year, but extracting useful information remains constrained by limited labels, heterogeneous sensors, and the cost of processing large archives. Foundation models reduce part of this burden by learning transferable representations from multi-source observations. More recently, these representations have been precomputed over [...]
Coastal Aquifer Energy in Plymouth, UK
Published: 2026-08-13
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Engineering
Plymouth, UK, is a city underlain by a coastal karstic aquifer system, impacted by saline intrusion. The aquifer is being investigated as a source of ambient water for a city-wide heat network. Findings of aquifer-energy pumping tests are reported, highlighting the arising opportunities and challenges. The concept presented here deviates from typical aquifer energy systems, in that thermally [...]
Model-Free Relative Permeability Estimation and Oil Recovery Prediction in Reservoir Rocks from Capillary Pressure Curves
Published: 2026-08-12
Subjects: Engineering, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
This paper presents and validates a model-free method for predicting the relative permeability and oil recovery of reservoir rocks directly from the shape of the capillary pressure curve, tested against real reservoir core, digital rock models, and a large soil-hydraulic dataset. Relative permeability is the key saturation function governing production forecasts, water cut, and oil recovery in [...]
Machine Learning for GIS-Based Flood Susceptibility Mapping: A Global Bibliometric and Systematic Review of Research Trends and Future Directions (2005-2026)
Published: 2026-08-12
Subjects: Engineering
Flood susceptibility mapping (FSM) has become an essential component of disaster risk reduction and sustainable environmental management, particularly with the growing frequency and severity of flood events under changing climatic conditions. The integration of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and machine learning (ML) has significantly improved the accuracy and efficiency of flood [...]
Barrier vulnerability following outwash: A balance of overwash and dune gap recovery
Published: 2026-08-11
Subjects: Engineering, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Existing barrier evolution models only simulate storm impacts from landward-driven flows (overwash), neglecting the impacts of seaward-directed flows (outwash). Here, we modify an existing model to incorporate outwash processes. We find that outwash enhances barrier vulnerability (the tendency to drown) over decadal timescales by scarring the island interior, creating lower, narrower landforms. [...]
Effect of Three-Phase Relative Permeability on Field-Scale Carbon Dioxide Storage and Oil Recovery
Published: 2026-08-04
Subjects: Engineering, Petroleum Engineering
Currently, the vast majority of subsurface carbon dioxide storage occurs in mature oil fields, where sequestration is combined with enhanced oil recovery. When carbon dioxide is injected below the minimum miscibility pressure, three-phase flow occurs. We study the sensitivity of assumptions made in the assignment of three-phase relative permeabilities on predicted oil recovery and carbon dioxide [...]
Reconstructing Spatial Denudation Patterns in a Reverse-Engineered Fluvial Catchment
Published: 2026-08-03
Subjects: Engineering
Quantifying the spatial heterogeneity of denudation rates is a challenge in geomorphology, particularly in tectonically subdued montane landscapes. We develop a sediment flux-based framework to estimate spatial denudation using a generic reverse-engineered fluvial catchment. The model combines physically based hydraulic geometry with a sediment transport relation to compute gravel flux throughout [...]
Microstructural Inference Framework for Saturated Soils Based on the Maximum Entropy Principle: Analytical Formulation, Numerical Implementation, and Validation
Published: 2026-07-31
Subjects: Engineering
The unit weight γ and the permeability k define an underdetermined inverse problem: infinitely many pore-size distributions p(s) are compatible with the same pair of observations. Empirical correlations resolve this ambiguity by imposing rigid structural forms —valid only for a limited range of materials— that do not hold across the broad spectrum of natural soils. This work formulates an [...]
Integrating Climate Change into Hydraulic Hazard Assessment: A Comprehensive Two-Dimensional Modeling Approach on the Muto Stream Basin
Published: 2026-07-30
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Civil Engineering, Engineering, Environmental Engineering
The Mediterranean basin is currently experiencing a profound shift in its climatological baseline, with extreme weather events striking coastal and inland catchments with unprecedented intensity. This changing paradigm forces engineers, hydrologists, and environmental planners to fundamentally rethink how spatial management and infrastructure design are approached. In this paper, we document and [...]
Beyond Black-Box Flood Susceptibility Mapping: An Explainable and Community-Validated GIS-Machine Learning Framework
Published: 2026-07-30
Subjects: Engineering
Floods are among the most destructive natural hazards, causing substantial economic losses, environmental degradation, and threats to human lives worldwide. Although Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and machine learning (ML) have significantly improved flood susceptibility mapping (FSM), many existing models remain difficult to interpret due to their black-box nature, limiting stakeholder [...]