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There is a renewed interest in using combustion for the recovery of medium viscosity oil. We consider the combustion process when air is injected into the porous medium containing some fuel and inert gas. Commonly the reaction rate is negligible at low temperatures, hence the possibility of oxygen breakthrough. In this case, the oxygen gets in contact with the fuel in the downstream zone leading to slow reaction. We focus on the case when the reaction is active for all temperatures, but heat losses are negligible. For a combustion model that includes heat and mass balance equations, we develop a method for calculating the wave profile in the form of an asymptotic expansion and derive its zero-and first-order approximations. This wave profile appears to be different from wave profiles analyzed in other papers, where only the reaction at the highest temperatures was taken into account. The combustion wave has a long decaying tail. This tail is hard to observe in the laboratory because heat losses must be very small for the long tail to form. Numerical simulations were performed in order to validate our asymptotic formulae.

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BackgroundThe global incidences of dengue virus have increased the interest in studying and understanding the mosquito population dynamics. It is predominantly spread by Aedes aegypti in the tropical and sub-tropical countries in the world. Understanding these dynamics is important for public health in countries where climatic and environmental conditions are favorable for the propagation of these diseases. For this reason, a new model has been proposed to investigate the population dynamics of mosquitoes in a city.MethodsThe present paper discusses the numerical modeling of population dynamics of Ae. aegypti mosquitoes in an urban neighborhood of a city using the finite volume method. The model describes how populations spread through the city assisted by the wind. This model allows incorporating external factors (wind and chemical insecticides) and topography data (streets, building blocks, parks, forests and beach). The proposed model has been successfully tested in examples involving two Brazilian cities (City center, Juiz de Fora and Copacabana Beach, Rio de Janeiro).ResultsInvasion phenomena of Ae. aegypti mosquitoes have been observed in each of the simulations. It was observed that, inside the blocks, the growth of the population for both winged and aquatic phase causes an infestation of Ae. aegypti in a short time. Within the blocks the mosquito population was concentrated and diffused slowly. In the streets, there was a long-distance spread, which was influenced by wind and diffusion with a low concentration of mosquito population. The model was also tested taking into account chemical insecticides spread in two different configurations. It has been observed that the insecticides have a significant effect on the mosquito population for both winged and aquatic phases when the chemical insecticides spread more uniformly along all the streets in a neighborhood of a city.ConclusionsThe presented methodology can be employed to evaluate and to understand the epidemic risks in a specific region of the city. Moreover the model allows an increase in efficiency of the existing mosquito population control techniques and to theoretically test new methods before involving the human population.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (10.1186/s13071-018-2829-1) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

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Background The Aedes aegypti mosquito is the primary vector for several diseases. Its control requires a better understanding of the mosquitoes’ live cycle, including the spatial dynamics. Several models address this issue. However, they rely on many hard to measure parameters. This work presents a model describing the spatial population dynamics of Aedes aegypti mosquitoes using partial differential equations (PDEs) relying on a few parameters. Methods We show how to estimate model parameter values from the experimental data found in the literature using concepts from dynamical systems, genetic algorithm optimization and partial differential equations. We show that our model reproduces some analytical formulas relating the carrying capacity coefficient to experimentally measurable quantities as the maximum number of mobile female mosquitoes, the maximum number of eggs, or the maximum number of larvae. As an application of the presented methodology, we replicate one field experiment numerically and investigate the effect of different frequencies in the insecticide application in the urban environment. Results The numerical results suggest that the insecticide application has a limited impact on the mosquitoes population and that the optimal application frequency is close to one week. Conclusions Models based on partial differential equations provide an efficient tool for simulating mosquitoes’ spatial population dynamics. The reduced model can reproduce such dynamics on a sufficiently large scale.

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We report a study of heavy oil recovery by combined water flooding and electromagnetic (EM) heating at a frequency of 2.45 GHz used in domestic microwave ovens. A mathematical model describing this process was developed. Model equations were solved and the solution is presented in an integral form for the one dimensional case. Experiments consisting of water injection into Bentheimer sandstone cores, either fully water-saturated or containing a model heavy oil, were also conducted, with and without EM heating. Model prediction was found to be in rather good agreement with an experiments. EM energy was efficiently absorbed by water and, under dynamic conditions, was transported deep into the porous medium. The amount of EM energy absorbed increases with water saturation. Oil recovery by water flooding combined with EM heating was up to 37.0% larger than for cold water flooding. These observations indicate that EM heating induces an overall improvement of the mobility ratio between the displacing water and the displaced heavy oil. Keywords EOR • Electromagnetic heating • Water flooding • Partial differential equations G. Chapiro was supported in part by Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Cientfico e Tecnolgico (CNPq) under grant 470635/2012-6 and FAPEMIG under grant APQ 01377/15.