Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Engineering
Low Environmental Impact Remediation of Microplastics: Visible-Light Photocatalytic Degradation of PET Microplastics Using Bio-Inspired C,N-TiO2/SiO2 Photocatalysts
Published: 2023-01-30
Subjects: Engineering
Microplastics (MPs) are plastic particles of ≤5 mm with a ubiquitous presence in aquatic ecosystems. MPs harm marine life and can cause severe health problems for humans. Advanced oxidation processes (AOPs) that involve the in-situ generation of highly oxidant hydroxyl radicals can be an alternative to fight MPs pollution. Of all the AOPs, photocatalysis has been proven a clean technology to [...]
A Data-driven Approach to Petroleum Engineering Problems
Published: 2023-01-19
Subjects: Education, Engineering
In this work, a data-driven approach is taken to tackle problems in Petroleum Engineering domain, for both conventional and unconventional reservoirs. Conventional reservoirs face the problem of losing energy for flowing after a few years of production, thus operators choose to inject water and inject CO$_2$ as a secondary and tertiary recovery method. The question of interest is that how [...]
A two-way coupling 2D-3D hybrid finite element numerical model using overlapping method for tsunami simulation
Published: 2023-01-13
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Engineering
This paper describes a 2D-3D hybrid model for tsunami simulations that uses an overlapping method based on an arbitrary grid. A 2D model is used to simulate wave propagation from the source area to the offshore area, and a 3D model is then used to simulate the free surface flow around structures in coastal areas. An overlapping method that satisfies the conservation and compatibility conditions [...]
Thermo-hydro-mechanical analysis of Bentonite at residual state
Published: 2023-01-10
Subjects: Engineering
This paper presents experimental and numerical investigations regarding the effect of temperature on the residual strength of Bentonite at slow-to-moderate shearing velocities. In order to understand the trigger mechanism of slow-moving landslides, we investigated the effect of temperature on the shear strength of slip surfaces. We performed ring-shear tests on Bentonite samples at various [...]
Real-time shallow landslide hazard assessment on a regional scale
Published: 2023-01-10
Subjects: Engineering
Shallow landslides are a major natural hazard in the UK, causing more than £10M of economic losses annually and posing clear threats to life. Rainfall is an essential control on shallow landslide risk, but network operators currently use generic ‘on-off’ warnings based on localised rainfall intensity and duration, giving no strategic information about where the hazard is highest or evolving the [...]
A thermomechanical model for argillaceous hard soils - weak rocks: application to THM simulation of deep excavations in claystone
Published: 2022-12-30
Subjects: Engineering
The paper presents the enhancement of an existing constitutive model for argillaceous hard soils-weak rocks for non-isothermal conditions, to be used in coupled thermo-hydro-mechanical (THM) simulations of underground excavations subjected to temperature variations within the context of deep geological nuclear waste disposal. The proposed thermo-elastoplastic extension accounts for the effect [...]
Information Content of Hydrologic Data across Space: Streamflow Predictions using Machine Learning
Published: 2022-12-29
Subjects: Engineering, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
This study aimed to assess the usefulness of data from donor watersheds to predict streamflow in parent watersheds. For this purpose, Long-Short Memory Network (LSTM) is used as an information extraction algorithm. Data from a total of 434 watersheds were used in this study. Out of these 434 watersheds, 57 watersheds were selected as the parent watersheds. These 57 watersheds were those where [...]
Changes in Streamflow Statistical Structure across the United States due to Recent Climate Change
Published: 2022-12-26
Subjects: Engineering, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
A variety of watershed responses to climate change are expected due to non-linear interactions between various hydrologic processes acting at different timescales that are modulated by watershed properties. Changes in statistical structure (spectral properties) of streamflow in the USA due to climate change were studied for water years 1980-2013. The Fractionally differenced Autoregressive [...]
MA-SARNet: A one-shot nowcasting framework for SAR image prediction with physical driving forces
Published: 2022-12-19
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Engineering
Remote sensing imagery is one of the most widely used data sources for large-scale Earth observations with consistent spatial and temporal quality. However, the current usage scenarios of Earth’s surface remote sensing images, such as those generated from Landsat, Sentinel 2, and SAR, are largely limited to retrospective tasks, as they are often used to reconstruct existing phenomena, such as [...]
Linking thermal and rate behavior with fabric and mineralogy of clayey shear zones: Experimental investigation on the El Forn landslide (Andorra)
Published: 2022-12-16
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Engineering, Geotechnical Engineering
Thermal triaxial tests were carried out on remolded material of core samples of the shear zone of a deep-seated landslide, the El Forn landslide (Andorra). With the thermal triaxial tests, we have obtained thermal and rate sensitivi- ties of the material outside and inside the shear band. Moreover, micro-scale tests were carried out, such as XRPD, SEM-EDS, MicroCT, and plasticity index. The [...]
A treatise on InSAR geometry and 3D displacement estimation
Published: 2022-12-14
Subjects: Engineering, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
The estimation of displacement vectors for (objects on) the Earth’s surface using satellite InSAR requires geometric transformations of the observables based on orbital viewing geometries. Usually, there are insufficient viewing geometries available for full 3D reconstruction, leading to non-unique solutions. Currently, there is no standardized approach to deal with this problem, resulting in [...]
A Web-based Analytical Urban Flood Damage and Loss Estimation Framework
Published: 2022-12-04
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Civil Engineering, Engineering, Risk Analysis, Systems and Communications
Information and communication technology serves a crucial role in communicating flood risk and consequences to a broad range of stakeholders and facilitating mitigation decisions. While studies extensively utilize flood inundation maps for communicating flood risks, there is a need to integrate a broad spectrum of physical vulnerability parameters into risk estimates at various spatial scales. [...]
Benchmarking a two-way coupled coastal wave-current hydrodynamics model
Published: 2022-12-02
Subjects: Engineering
Wave-current interaction phenomena are often represented through coupled model frameworks in ocean modelling. However, the benchmarking of these models is scarce, revealing a substantial research challenge. We seek to address this through a selection of benchmark cases for coupled wave-current interaction modelling frameworks. This comprises a series of analytical and experimental test cases [...]
SWAT model-based quantification of the impact of land use change on sediment yield in the Fincha watershed, Ethiopia
Published: 2022-12-01
Subjects: Engineering, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
In recent years, Ethiopia is facing problems due to soil erosion, mainly because of the conversion of natural vegetation cover into cultivated land. Soil erosion is also affecting dam reservoirs, which are threatened by an increase in sediment yield entering the lake. The present study focuses on the Ethiopian Fincha watershed and takes advantage of the potentiality of SWAT, to investigate how [...]
Laboratory validation of a new hydro-mechanical energy-based brittleness index model for hydraulic fracturing
Published: 2022-12-01
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Earth Sciences, Engineering, Engineering Science and Materials, Mining Engineering, Oil, Gas, and Energy, Petroleum Engineering
Brittleness Index (BI) is a critical parameter characterising the deformation regime of geo-materials, covering the range from purely brittle (fractures) to ductile (plastic flow). A variety of BI models have been developed based on rock properties such as mineralogy, elastic parameters, or stress-strain data. However, very few of them are based on the deformation induced by hydro-mechanical [...]