The gas flow in shale matrix is of great research interests for optimized shale gas extraction. The gas flow in the nano-scale pore may fall in flow regimes such as viscous flow, slip flow and Knudsen diffusion. A 3-dimensional nano-scale pore network model was developed to simulate dynamic gas flow, and to describe the transient properties of flow regimes. The proposed pore network model accounts for the various size distributions and low connectivity of shale pores. The pore size, pore throat size and coordination number obey normal distribution, and the average values can be obtained from shale reservoir data. The gas flow regimes were simulated using an extracted pore network backbone. The numerical results show that apparent permeability is strongly dependent on pore pressure in the reservoir and pore throat size, which is overestimated by low-pressure laboratory tests. With the decrease of reservoir pressure, viscous flow is weakening, then slip flow and Knudsen diffusion are gradually becoming dominant flow regimes. The fingering phenomenon can be predicted by micro/nano-pore network for gas flow, which provides an effective way to capture heterogeneity of shale gas reservoir.
SUMMARYTwo approaches of generating pore networks of porous media are presented to capture the pore fabric. The first methodology extracted pore structure from a computer simulated packing of spheres. The modified Delaunay tessellation was used to describe the porous media, and modified Nelder-Mead method in conjunction with three pore-merging algorithms was used to generate the pore size and coordination number distributions of the randomly packed spheres. The Biconical Abscissa Asymmetric CONcentric bond was used to describe the connection between two adjacent voids. This algorithm was validated by predicting pore structure of a cubic array of spheres of equal radius with known pore sizes, throat sizes and coordination number distributions. The predicted distributions of pore structure agreed well with the measured. Then, the algorithm was used to predict pore structure and permeability of randomly packed spherical particles, and predicted permeability values were compared with published experimental data. The results showed that the predicted permeability values were in good agreement with those measured, confirming the proposed algorithm can capture the main flow paths of packed beds. The second methodology generated an equivalent pore network of porous media, of which the centers of voids were located in a regular lattice with constant pore center distance. However, this network allowed for matching both main geometrical and topological characteristics of the porous media. A comparison of the two approaches suggested that the second approach can also be used as a predictive tool to quantitatively study the microscopic properties of flow through porous media.
Air sparging (AS) is one of the most efficient techniques for remediating saturated soils and groundwater contaminated with volatile organic compounds. A series of physical modeling tests for different sizes of porous media under varied injection pressure were conducted to investigate the effect of particle size and air injection pressure on size and shape of the zone of influence (ZOI). The test results show that ZOI can be expressed by two components: the horizontal expansion due to pneumatic fracture or preferential intrusion around the injection point and the angle of ZOI which is the angle between the vertical line and the boundary of ZOI. There exists a limited angle of ZOI for each type of porous media. The measured minimum and maximum air injection pressures in 1g tests are compared with corresponding theoretical values, and it is found that the measured minimum injection pressure is slightly lower than the theoretical value, while the measured maximum injection pressure is much higher than the theoretical maximum injection pressure. Centrifugal test results confirmed nonapplicability of theoretical maximum injection pressure to air sparging design. All of the above provide valuable information for design and theoretical modeling of air sparging for groundwater remediation.
Air sparging is an in situ soil/groundwater remediation technology, which involves the injection of pressurized air through air sparging well below the zone of contamination. To investigate the rate-dependent flow properties during multistep air sparging, a rule-based dynamic two-phase flow model was developed and applied to a 3D pore network which is employed to characterize the void structure of porous media. The simulated dynamic two-phase flow at the pore scale or microscale was translated into functional relationships at the continuum-scale of capillary pressure-saturation (P c -S) and relative permeabilitysaturation (K r -S) relationships. A significant contribution from the air injection pressure step and duration time of each air injection pressure on both of the above relationships was observed during the multistep air sparging tests. It is observed from the simulation that at a given matric potential, larger amount of water is retained during transient flow than that during steady flow. Shorter the duration of each air injection pressure step, there is higher fraction of retained water. The relative air/water permeability values are also greatly affected by the pressure step. With large air injection pressure step, the air/water relative permeability is much higher than that with a smaller air injection pressure step at the same water saturation level. However, the impact of pressure step on relative permeability is not consistent for flows with different capillary numbers (N ca ). When compared with relative air permeability, relative water permeability has a higher scatter. It was further observed that the dynamic effects on the relative permeability curve are more apparent for networks with larger pore sizes than that with smaller pore sizes. In addition, the effect of pore size on relative water permeability is higher than that on relative air permeability.
The main objective of this study is to develop and evaluate the immobilization of Staphylococcal Protein A on magnetic cellulose microspheres (SPA-MCMS) for immunological capture of IgG. After cloning, expression and separation, SPA was immobilized onto MCMS to prepare a magnetic affinity media subject to the purification of IgGs. The binding capacity, binding time, leakage of SPA and its reproducibility were optimized to improve the binding efficiency with an appropriate amount and recovery of IgG. Rabbit IgG was successfully purified from serum in a single-step by SPA-MCMS with an overall recovery of 73.18% and purity of 90.27%. Therefore, this study effectively illustrated the advantages of magnetic microcarriers for rapid and efficient purification of antibodies. The separation media shows a high potential for the future development of affinity isolation and immunodiagnostic application.
Air sparging (AS) is an in situ soil/groundwater remediation technology, which involves the injection of pressurized air/oxygen through an air sparging well below the zone of contamination. Characterizing the mechanisms governing movement of air through saturated porous media is critical for the design of an effective cleanup treatment system. In this research, micromechanical investigation was performed to understand the physics of air migration and subsequent spatial distribution of air at pore scale during air sparging. The void space in the porous medium was first characterized by pore network consisting of connected pore bodies and bonds. The biconical abscissa asymmetric concentric bond was used to describe the connection between two adjacent pore bodies. Then a rule-based dynamic two-phase flow model was developed and applied to the pore network model. A forward integration of time was performed using the Euler scheme. For each time step, the effective viscosity of the fluid was calculated based on fractions of two phases in each bond, and capillary pressures across the menisci was considered to compute the pressure field. The developed dynamic model was used to study the rate-dependent drainage during air sparging. The effect of the capillary number and geometrical properties of the network on the dynamic flow properties of two-phase flow including residual saturation, spatial distribution of air and water, dynamic phase transitions, and relative permeability-capillary pressure curves were systematically investigated. Results showed that all the above information for describing the air water two-phase flow are not intrinsic properties of the porous medium but are affected by the two-phase flow dynamics and spatial distribution of each phase, providing new insight to air sparging.
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