The effects of porous medium heterogeneity on methane hydrate formation, water flow through the heterogeneous hydrate-bearing sand, and hydrate dissociation were observed in an experiment using a heterogeneous sand column with prescribed heterogeneities. X-ray computed tomography (CT) was used to monitor saturation changes in water, gas, and hydrate during hydrate formation, water flow, and hyd...

The simultaneous flow of oil and water in porous media is described by relative permeability curves, mainly derived from laboratory experiments. Relative permeability is of paramount importance in predicting reservoir production performance and drive mechanisms and its value depends largely on the volume fraction of fluids present in the test samples. Nowadays X-ray scanners are one of the most...

Water saturation and cation exchange capacity are the most significant parameters used to calculate a hydrocarbon zone potential. In clean formations, by applying the famous Archie model, which assumes that in the formation the only electric conductor is the formation water, the water saturation can be calculated. Additionally, in shaly sand formations this assumption may not be true as the ion...

Mechanisms for interpreting anomalous decreases in radon in ground water prior to earthquakes are examined with the help of a case study to show that radon potentially is a sensitive tracer of strain changes in the crust preceding an earthquake. The 2003 Chengkung earthquake of magnitude (M) 6.8 on December 10, 2003, was the strongest earthquake near the Chengkung area in eastern Taiwan since 1...

In this work, total smooth air-water interfacial areas were measured for a series of nine natural and model sandy porous media as a function of water saturation using synchrotron X-ray microtomography. Interfacial areas decreased linearly with water satuation, while the estimated maximum interfacial area compared favorably to the media geometric surface areas. Importantly, relative interfacial ...

The effect of charcoal-drug ratio on the antidotal efficacy of oral activated charcoal was studied in six healthy volunteers in a randomized cross-over study and compared with the adsorption capacity of activated charcoal in vitro. Aminosalicylic acid (PAS) 1 g and 5 g were ingested on an empty stomach in 30 ml of water. Immediately afterwards the subjects ingested 50 g of activated charcoal in...

Electrowetting on dielectric and dielectrophoretic electromechanical mechanisms dominate microfluidic actuation in the low- and high-frequency limits, respectively. The frequency-dependent relationship between these two mechanisms has been clarified by the Maxwell stress tensor and a simple RC circuit model. In this paper, we report extensive height-of-rise measurements obtained with vertical, ...

Sand improvements using organic agents have shown promising results. Polyacrylamide is one possible organic agent, which has been shown to influence the shear strength, stiffness, soil remediation, and erosion resistance of geomaterials. In this study, we explored the shear wave velocity (S-wave) and water retention curves of unsaturated sands containing polyacrylamide solutions. The shear wave...

A series of experiments and related numerical simulations were carried out to study one-dimensional water redistribution processes in an unsaturated soil. A long horizontal Plexiglas box was packed as homogenously as possible with sand. The sandbox was divided into two sections using a very thin metal plate, with one section initially fully saturated and the other section only partially saturat...