This paper presents a new aquathermolysis study of conventional heavy oil in superheated steam. A new high temperature autoclave was designed, where volume and pressure could be adjusted. Aquathermolysis was studied on two different conventional heavy oil samples under different reaction times and temperatures. Experimental results show that aquathermolysis does take place for conventional heavy oil. As reaction time increases, the oil viscosity reduces. However, the reaction will reach equilibrium after a certain period of time and won't be sensitive to any further reaction time any more. Analysis shows that, while resin and asphaltenes decrease, saturated hydrocarbons and the H/C ratio increase after reaction. The main mechanism of aquathermolysis includes hydrogenization, desulfuration reaction of resin and asphaltenes, etc.
Friction is widespread in almost every field in the oil and gas industry, and it is accompanied by huge energy losses and potential safety hazards. To deal with a series of questions in this regard, biomimetic surfaces have been developed over the past decades to significantly reduce economic losses. Presently, biomimetic surface engineering on different scales has been successfully introduced into related fields of the oil and gas industry, such as drill bits and the inner surfaces of pipes. In this review, we focused on the most recent and promising efforts reported toward the application of a biomimetic surface in oil and gas fields, indicating the necessity and importance of establishing this disciplinary study. Regarding the oil and gas industry, we mainly analyzed and summarized some important research results into the following three aspects: (i) applications in reducing the wear of exploration production equipment and its components, (ii) separation and drag release technologies in oil/gas storage and transportation, and (iii) functional coatings used in oil and gas development in oceans and polar regions. Finally, based on an in-depth analysis of the development of biomimetic surface engineering in the fields of oil and gas, some conclusions and perspectives are also discussed. It is expected that biomimetic surface engineering can be used in oil and gas fields more widely and systematically, providing important contributions to green development in the near future.
In this paper, a route-planning approach is proposed based on the region-segmentation Dynamic Programming (DP) algorithm for Automated Guided Vehicles (AGVs) in large Smart Road Network Systems (SRNSs) to deal with the problem of low route computation efficiency of the classical DP algorithm. We introduced an improved Markov Decision Process (MDP) to describe SRNSs, in which the SRNSs are divided into several regions according to the AGVs’ start nodes and their goal nodes to improve the route-planning efficiency. Moreover, the route with the minimum number of turns is selected to reduce the system running time and energy cost in the following way: first, all the equidistant shortest routes are acquired from the AGVs’ start nodes to their goal nodes using the improved DP algorithm; then, the routes are screened by calculating the angular deviation between all feasible routes and AGVs’ initial directions, and the route with the fewest number of turns is taken as the shortest-time route. The simulation results verified that the proposed method can effectively solve the route-planning problem of AGVs in current SRNSs.
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