Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Engineering
FIND: A Synthetic weather generator to control drought Frequency, Intensity, and Duration
Published: 2023-08-04
Subjects: Engineering, Other Civil and Environmental Engineering
Water systems worldwide are experiencing climate change-induced shifts in drought properties like frequency, intensity, and duration, affecting water security and reliability. To develop and test effective drought preparedness plans, researchers often use synthetic weather generators to create hydrological scenarios that explore drought variability beyond historical records. Existing weather [...]
A Web-based Decision Support Framework for Optimizing Road Network Accessibility and Emergency Facility Allocation During Flooding
Published: 2023-08-03
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Engineering, Environmental Studies, Geographic Information Sciences, Geography, Risk Analysis
Transportation systems can be significantly affected by flooding, leading to physical damage and subsequent adverse impacts such as increased travel distance to essential services. Even though flooding is a frequently recurring phenomenon that can affect thousands of people per event, there are limited accessible online tools available for analyzing and visualizing flood risk for supporting [...]
Estimating Reservoir Sedimentation Using Deep Learning
Published: 2023-08-03
Subjects: Engineering, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Several reservoirs across the US are filling with sediment, which jeopardizes their functionality and increases maintenance costs. The US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) developed the Reservoir Sedimentation Information (RSI) system to assess reservoir aggradation and track dam operation suitability for water-resource management and dam safety. The RSI dataset contains historical [...]
Ultrasonic degradation of GenX (HFPO-DA) - Performance comparison to PFOA and PFOS at high frequencies
Published: 2023-07-31
Subjects: Engineering
Sonolytic degradation kinetics of hexafluoropropylene oxide-dimer acid (HFPO-DA or GenX) were studied for the first time at four high ultrasonic frequencies (375, 580, 860 and 1,140 kHz) and three power densities (200, 300 and 400 W/L), and compared to the degradation of previously studied perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) and perfluorooctanesulfonic acid (PFOS). The frequency of 580 kHz displayed [...]
Retrieving the irrigation actually applied at district scale: assimilating high-resolution Sentinel-1-derived soil moisture data into a FAO-56-based model
Published: 2023-07-25
Subjects: Engineering
Irrigation is the most water consuming activity in the world. Knowing the timing and amount of irrigation that is actually applied is therefore fundamental for water managers. However, this information is rarely available at all scales and is subject to large uncertainties due to the great diversity of existing agricultural practices and associated irrigation regimes (full irrigation, deficit [...]
Python workflow for segmenting multiphase flow in porous rocks
Published: 2023-07-25
Subjects: Engineering, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
The need for accurate, consistent and fast image processing has become an important part of the investigation of multiphase flow through porous media. We describe an open-source image processing workflow written in python, using the sci-kit toolbox. We demonstrate the methodology to segment multiple fluids (gas and brine), and the rock grains for a Bentheimer sandstone. This workflow can be [...]
Lower summer lake levels in regulated perialpine lakes, caused by climate change
Published: 2023-07-20
Subjects: Engineering
Alpine regions are particularly sensitive to climate change due to the pronounced effect on snow and glacial melt. In this context, large perialpine lakes play a crucial role in modulating climate change impacts on water resources, which brings together diverse interests. However, climate change studies on river systems rarely include lakes or lake level management. An open question is how to [...]
Commercial-Scale Demonstration of a First-of-a-Kind Enhanced Geothermal System
Published: 2023-07-18
Subjects: Engineering, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Fervo Energy has completed construction of a commercial enhanced geothermal system (EGS) project and has qualified full functionality of the system through production testing at commercially relevant operating conditions. The project site is located in a nearfield setting adjacent to an operating geothermal power station in north-central Nevada and is designed to deliver an uplift in [...]
Waterflood-CMG production optimization analysis for the Draugen field of Norway
Published: 2023-07-18
Subjects: Engineering
The Draugen field is well-known for producing oil that is then transported to power plant facilities to generate electricity in Draugen. However, with declining oil production (as of 2021) and new necessary electrification contracts, the field may be unable to meet the demand for plant facilities. The current study combines waterflooding and reservoir simulation methods from the Computer [...]
Assisted upscaling of miscible CO¬2-enhanced oil recovery floods using an artificial-neural-network-based optimisation algorithm
Published: 2023-07-13
Subjects: Engineering, Other Engineering
The fine-scale compositional simulations required to accurately model miscible CO2 flooding are unrealistic and highly computationally expensive, and upscaling procedures are required to approximate the behaviour of these fine-scale grids on more realistic coarse-scale models. These procedures include the pseudoisation of relative permeabilities which ensures the matching of large-scale effects [...]
Techno-economic evaluation of the potential of CO2 storage and Enhanced Oil Recovery in the Niger-Delta Hydrocarbon Basin using reservoir simulation: Case Study
Published: 2023-07-12
Subjects: Engineering, Other Engineering
The constant dependence on fossil fuel combustion for energy and industrial activities results in global warming and climate change due to the increased atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases such as CO2. CO2 storage in mature petroleum reservoirs is considered one of the most viable ways to reduce CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere. The Niger-Delta hydrocarbon basin holds significant [...]
A high-resolution, 3D groundwater-surface water simulation of the contiguous US: Advances in the integrated ParFlow CONUS 2.0 modeling platform
Published: 2023-07-10
Subjects: Engineering
Large-scale, high-resolution hydrologic modeling is an important tool to address questions of water quantity, availability, and recharge. Continental-to-Global scale models, particularly those that include groundwater, are growing in number. However, many of these approaches simplify aspects of the system and the connections between e.g., surface water and groundwater. The ParFlow CONUS modeling [...]
Satellite-derived shorelines for monitoring of sandy beaches: a benchmark study
Published: 2023-07-10
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Earth Sciences, Engineering, Environmental Engineering, Geomorphology, Oceanography, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Other Earth Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Satellite remote sensing is becoming a widely used monitoring technique in coastal sciences. Yet, no benchmarking studies exist that compare the performance of popular satellite-derived shoreline (SDS) mapping algorithms against standardized sets of inputs and validation data. Here we present a new benchmarking framework to evaluate the accuracy of shoreline change observations extracted from [...]
Optimising the value of a CO2 Water-Alternating-Gas injection project under geological and economic uncertainties using an improved artificial neural network.
Published: 2023-07-08
Subjects: Engineering, Other Engineering
The numerical simulations required for the robust optimisation of the alternating injection of water and CO2 in hydrocarbon reservoirs are computationally expensive due to engineering, geological, and economic uncertainties. Using approximation models of the desired objective function(s) can significantly decrease the cost associated with the optimisation routines while providing an adequate [...]
Differential effects of climate change on average and peak demand for heating and cooling across the contiguous United States
Published: 2023-07-07
Subjects: Engineering
While most electricity systems are designed to handle peak demand during summer months, pathways to deep decarbonization generally electrify building heating, thus increasing electricity demand during winter. A key question is how climate variability and change will affect peak heating and cooling demand in an electrified future. We conduct a spatially explicit analysis of trends in [...]