Ketamine had an analgesic effect similar to morphine and carried a lower risk of airway problems. The risk of hallucinations and agitation was increased in the ketamine group. These findings are of medical significance, particularly in rough and low-resource scenarios.

No abstract

Water usage in hydraulic fracturing jobs has been increasing continuously, mostly due to multistage hydraulic fracturing of horizontal wells in unconventional reservoirs. Meanwhile, nearly 100 billion barrels of produced water, often with total dissolved solids (TDS) higher than seawater, is being generated every year from oilfield operations. Operating cost could be lowered if produced water is used in place of fresh water in fracturing activities, due to the reduced fresh water consumption and produced water disposal cost. Formulating slickwater or linear fracturing fluids with high-TDS produced water is a common practice. Crosslinked fluids have also been prepared with salt and hard produced water for medium and low temperature applications. At elevated temperatures above 250°F, it becomes much more challenging to make stable crosslinked fluids with untreated produced water due to the damage caused by the high water salinity and hardness. Without resorting to scale inhibitors and/or high fluid pH, fracturing fluids prepared with untreated high-TDS produced water have so far shown stability at around 275°F. With careful selections of the fluid additives, a new high-temperature fracturing fluid system was recently formulated with untreated produced water having TDS at or above 295,000 mg/L. Made up of metal-crosslinked polysaccharides, the fluids were stable at high temperatures of 300°F or more. In representative tests, the fluid viscosity stayed above 100 cP (at 100 s−1 shear rate) for 2 hours at 300°F. To reduce the scaling tendency and enhance the gel cleanup, the fluid pH was suppressed to 7.2 or below as measured at surface temperature, resulting in a regained permeability of 77% in the conductivity test. Overall, the new produced water-based fluid system showed satisfactory performances at 300°F in fluid viscosity and stability, regained conductivity, and scaling tendency. The key roles played by the additives to render the fluid stability at 300°F will be discussed for the high-temperature fracturing fluids prepared with high-TDS produced water, and the laboratory test results will be presented in detail.

No abstract

A dual phase steel has been produced directly from the liquid under conditions that simulate direct strip casting and thin slab casting. The kinetics of polygonal ferrite formation during the inter-critical anneal were quantified using the JMAK approach, and this revealed significantly retarded transformation kinetics in the strip cast samples compared to the commercial steel that was processed through the conventional hot rolling approach. The transformation rate in the strip cast samples were as much as three orders of magnitude slower compared to the commercial steel. It was found that the kinetics of the ferrite formation were retarded principally by the large prior austenite grain size in the strip cast samples, and this hypothesis was tested experimentally by both coarsening of the prior austenite grain size, and by refinement of the prior austenite grain size. However, even after grain size normalization, small differences in transformation kinetics between the direct strip cast and commercial steel specimens were observed. These differences were explained by investigation of MnS precipitation in the steels. It was found that the transformation rate is high when the solutes are in solid solution, and that the rate of transformation slows significantly when precipitation of nano-precipitates occurs.