Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Engineering
Copper availability governs nitrous oxide accumulation in wetland soils and stream sediments
Published: 2021-12-15
Subjects: Biogeochemistry, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Earth Sciences, Engineering, Environmental Engineering, Geochemistry, Life Sciences
Denitrification is microbially-mediated through enzymes containing metal cofactors. Laboratory studies of pure cultures have highlighted that the availability of Cu, required for the multicopper enzyme nitrous oxide reductase, can limit N2O reduction. However, in natural aquatic systems, such as wetlands and hyporheic zones in stream beds, the role of Cu in controlling denitrification remains [...]
Adaptive Mesh Refinement Strategies for a Novel Modelof Immiscible Fluid Flow in Fractures
Published: 2021-12-13
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Computational Engineering, Engineering
In this paper, we consider two Adaptive Mesh Refinement (AMR) methods to simulate flow through fractures using a novel multiphase model. The approach represents the fluid using a two-dimensional parallel-plate model that employs techniques adapted from lattice-Boltzmann simulations to track the fluid interface. Here, we discuss different mesh refinement strategies for the model and compare [...]
Evaluating essential features of proppant transport at engineering scales combining field measurements with machine learning algorithms
Published: 2021-12-06
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Earth Sciences, Engineering, Environmental Sciences, Geology, Hydraulic Engineering, Oil, Gas, and Energy, Sustainability
The characterization of the proppant transport at a field-engineering scale is still challenging due to the lack of direct subsurface measurements. Features that control the proppant transport may link the experimental and numerical observations to the practical operations at a field scale. To improve the numerical and laboratory simulations, we propose a machine-learning-based workflow to [...]
Spatio-temporal clustering of seismicity enabled by off-fault plasticity
Published: 2021-12-06
Subjects: Applied Mechanics, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Dynamics and Dynamical Systems, Earth Sciences, Engineering, Engineering Mechanics, Engineering Science and Materials, Geophysics and Seismology, Mechanical Engineering, Mechanics of Materials, Other Mechanical Engineering, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Tribology
While significant progress has been made in understanding earthquake source processes in linear elastic domains, the effect of more realistic rheologies including plasticity is poorly understood. Here, we simulate sequence of earthquake and aseismic slip of a 2D antiplane rate-and-state fault embedded in a full-space elastic-plastic bulk. We show that off-fault plasticity may lead to partial [...]
Soil Excavation pH level Modification
Published: 2021-12-06
Subjects: Engineering
Territories are becoming new areas for conservationist replanting and forestation. Excavators are capable of producing entrainment s for new reservations. There lacks knowledge of soil conditions and methods of measurement of fertility of the developments. This research improves knowledge on the subject of excavations. To decide on territories which can be a best fit for excavations.
An Online-Learned Neural Network Chemical Solver for Stable Long-Term Global Simulations of Atmospheric Chemistry
Published: 2021-12-02
Subjects: Engineering, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
A major computational barrier in global modeling of atmospheric chemistry is the numerical integration of the coupled kinetic equations describing the chemical mechanism. Machine-learned (ML) solvers can offer order-of-magnitude speedup relative to conventional implicit solvers, but past implementations have suffered from fast error growth and only run for short simulation times (<1 month). A [...]
Optimizing nature-based solutions by combining social equity, hydro-environmental performance, and economic costs through a novel Gini coefficient
Published: 2021-11-15
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Civil Engineering, Computational Engineering, Engineering, Environmental Studies, Geographic Information Sciences, Geography, Nature and Society Relations, Operations Research, Systems Engineering and Industrial Engineering, Physical and Environmental Geography, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Systems Engineering
A robust multi-functional framework for widespread planning of nature-based solutions (NBS) must incorporate components of social equity and hydro-environmental performance in a cost-effective manner. NBS systems address stormwater mitigation by increasing on-site infiltration and evaporation through enhanced greenspace while also improving various components of societal well-being, such as [...]
Elastoplastic constitutive behavior and strain localization of a low-porosity sandstone during brittle fracturing
Published: 2021-11-12
Subjects: Engineering, Mechanics of Materials
We investigated the elastoplastic behavior and strain localization of the Zigong sandstone (porosity: 6.5%) during brittle fracturing based on two series of axisymmetric compression experiments. The experiments were conducted under various confining pressures (σ3 = 0 ~ 80 MPa). For each confining pressure, the sandstone specimens were deformed under constant axial and circumferential strain [...]
The future of Alpine Run-of-River hydropower production: climate change, environmental flow requirements, and technical production potential
Published: 2021-11-11
Subjects: Engineering
Past studies on the impacts of climate change (CC) on Alpine hydropower production have focused on high-head accumulation power plants. We provide one of the first comprehensive, simulation-based studies on CC impacts on Alpine Run-of-River (RoR) production, also considering effects of environmental flow requirements and technical increase potential. We simulate future electricity production [...]
Non-linear multiphase flow in hydrophobic porous media
Published: 2021-11-08
Subjects: Engineering, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Multiphase flow in porous materials is conventionally described by an empirical extension to Darcy’s law which assumes that the pressure gradient is proportional to flow rate. Through a series of two-phase flow experiments, we demonstrate that even when capillary forces are dominant at the pore scale, there is a non-linear intermittent flow regime with a power-law dependence between pressure gradient [...]
Regional analysis of climate projections using Bias Corrected spatial disaggregated super-resolution convolutional neural networks
Published: 2021-11-04
Subjects: Engineering, Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Climate change is very crucial for ecological systems and society. But Global climate models run at coarse spatial resolution which is difficult to do regional analysis. Regional-scale projections can be obtained by a technique called statistical downscaling which uses past data to find out the high resolution and low-resolution mapping. There are many methods for statistical downscaling of [...]
Flood Risk Assessment and Quantification at the Community and Property Level in the State of Iowa
Published: 2021-10-27
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Engineering, Risk Analysis
Flood risk assessment contributes to identifying at-risk communities and supports mitigation decisions to maximize benefits from the investments. Large-scale risk assessments generate invaluable inputs for prioritizing regions for the distribution of limited resources. High-resolution flood maps and accurate parcel information are critical for flood risk analysis to generate reliable outcomes for [...]
Flood Mitigation Data Analytics and Decision Support Framework: Iowa Middle Cedar Watershed Case Study
Published: 2021-10-23
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Engineering, Environmental Studies, Geographic Information Sciences, Risk Analysis
Flooding is one of the most frequent natural disasters, causing billions of dollars in damage and threatening vulnerable communities worldwide. Although the impact of flooding can never be diminished, minimizing future losses is possible by taking structural or non-structural mitigation actions. Mitigation applications are often costly practices. However, they can be more feasible for long-term [...]
Linking technical geothermal potential from borehole heat exchangers and heating demand scenarios on a regional scale
Published: 2021-10-20
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Earth Sciences, Engineering, Environmental Sciences, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Other Earth Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Extracting shallow geothermal energy using borehole heat exchangers (BHEs) can help decarbonising the residential heating sector. To assist urban planers and policy makers in developing carbon-neutral heating plans the regional technical shallow geothermal potential must be analysed. Here, we propose a methodology to estimate the technical geothermal potential of BHE fields on a regional scale [...]
Human-in-the-Loop Segmentation of Earth Surface Imagery
Published: 2021-10-16
Subjects: Engineering, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Segmentation, or the classification of pixels (grid cells) in imagery, is ubiquitously applied in the natural sciences. Manual methods are often prohibitively time-consuming, especially those images consisting of small objects and/or significant spatial heterogeneity of colors or textures. Labeling complicated regions of transition that in Earth surface imagery are represented by collections of [...]