Eastern Estonia has large oil shale mines and industrial facilities mainly focused on electricity generation from oil shale and shale oil extraction, which produce high air pollution emissions. The "Study of the health impact of the oil shale sector-SOHOS" was aimed at identifying the impacts on residents' health and annoyance due to the industrial processing. First, a population-wide survey ab...

A characterization study was performed on the spent oil shale (oil shale ash) obtained from the combustion of Jordanian oil shale. This characterization utilized different analytical techniques. These include scanning electron microscope with energy dispersive spectrum analysis, X-ray fluorescence, X-ray diffraction and Qemscan. During the combustion process, minimal fragmentation was encounter...

In this study, synthetic sulfonated polymers were used in order to enhance the rheological properties of drilling fluids. The capability of these polymers in reducing the effects of environmentally friendly, but harmful, pollutants such as cement, calcium chloride, gypsum as well as pH changes were investigated. In the present work, two sulfonated synthetic polymers, namely Polythin and Polydri...

Shale-gas production using hydraulic fracturing of mostly horizontal wells has led to considerable controversy over water-resource and environmental impacts. The study objective was to quantify net water use for shale-gas production using data from Texas, which is the dominant producer of shale gas in the U.S. with a focus on three major plays: the Barnett Shale (~15,000 wells, mid-2011), Texas...

The fluorescent dye Lucifer Yellow (LY) is a well-known and widely-used marker for fluid-phase endocytosis. In this paper, both light and electron microscopy revealed that LY was internalized into transition zone cells of the inner cortex of intact maize root apices. The internalized LY was localized within tubulo-vesicular compartments invaginating from the plasma membrane at actomyosin-enrich...

The wetting properties of solid surfaces are significant in oil/gas and liquid displacement processes. It is difficult for hydrophobic fluids to permeate channels filled with hydrophilic particles and an aqueous phase, and this is thought to be the primary cause of low yields in low permeability reservoir operations. Using three-dimensional lattice Boltzmann simulations, we show that particles ...

in the industry to damp out power system oscillations. In this paper, particle swarm optimization (PSO) technique is applied to design a robust power system stabilizer (PSS). The design problem of the proposed controller is formulated as an optimization problem and PSO is employed to search for optimal controller parameters. By minimizing the time-domain based objective function, in which the d...

This paper proposes a reinforcement learning based SVC controller to improve the damping of power systems in the presence of load model parameters uncertainty. The proposed method is trained over a wide range of typical load parameters in order to adapt the gains of the SVC stabilizer. The simulation results show that the tuned gains of the SVC stabilizer using Reinforcement Learning can provid...