Identification of the Liquid and Vapour Transport Parameters of an Ecological Building Material in Its Early Stages

To fulfil the requirements of the new environmental standards in the building sector, increased use of materials containing vegetable particles (hemp) is expected. The manufacturing process of these materials has not yet reached the industrial stage which requires control of the drying process. The objective of this work is to study the various mechanisms of heat and mass transfers occurring during the drying of lime–hemp materials. A macroscopic model has been developed and solved numerically. In order to obtain the moisture transport coefficients, an optimization algorithm was used, allowing the estimation of parameter values by minimising an error criterion between simulated and experimental observations.     

Measuring transport coefficients necessary for the description of coupled two-phase flow of immiscible fluids in porous media

In the simplist cases of coupled two-phase flow of immiscible fluids in porous media, the governing equations usually are written to show that there are four independent transport coefficients that implicitly have to be separately measured. The analysis presented here accordingly indicates that two types of known experiments involving two measurements apiece are needed at each fluid saturation condition in order to provide the necessary and sufficient information by which the unsteady as well as the steady states of ensuing transport processes can be established and characterized. Apparently, however, the fact that methodologies are already available for the required laboratory work either is not widely appreciated or it is being overlooked. For this reason and others, mention is made of the surprising fact that the experimental difficulties to be confronted in the actual study of coupled transport processes are no greater than those that have already been dealt with by the advocates of classical relative permeability theory (i.e. the traditionalists who simplistically model two-phase flow as though no coupling effects are involved).     

Stochastic equations for continuum and determination of hydraulic drag coefficients for smooth flat plate and smooth round tube with taking into account intensity and scale of turbulent flow

The stochastic equations of continuum are used for determining the hydraulic drag coefficients. As a result, the formulas for the hydraulic drag coefficients dependent on the turbulence intensity and scale instead of only on the Reynolds number are proposed for the classic flows of an incompressible fluid along a smooth flat plate and a round smooth tube. It is shown that the new expressions for the classical drag coefficients, which depend only on the Reynolds number, should be obtained from these new general formulas if to use the well-known experimental data for the initial turbulence. It is found that the limitations of classical empirical and semiempirical formulas for the hydraulic drag coefficients and their deviation from the experimental data depend on different parameters of initial fluctuations in the flow for different experiments in a wide range of Reynolds numbers. On the basis of these new dependencies, it is possible to explain that the differences between the experimental results for the fixed Reynolds number are caused by the difference in the values of flow fluctuations for each experiment instead of only due to the systematic error in the processing of experiments. Accordingly, the obtained general dependencies for the smooth flat plate and the smooth round tube can serve as the basis for clarifying the results of experiments and the experimental formulas, which used for continuum flows in different devices.     

Effects of Material Symmetry on the Coefficients of Transport in Anisotropic Porous Media

The objective of this article is to highlight certain features of a number of coefficients that appear in models of phenomena of transport in anisotropic porous media, especially the coefficient of dispersion the second-rank tensor D _ij , and the dispersivity coefficient, the fourth-rank tensor a _ijkl , that appear in models of solute transport. Although we shall focus on the transport of mass of a dissolved chemical species in a fluid phase that occupies the void space, or part of it, the same discussion is also applicable to transport coefficients that appear in models that describe the advective mass flux of a fluid and the diffusive transport of other extensive quantities, like heat. The case of coupled processes, e.g. the simultaneous transport of heat and mass of a chemical species, are also considered. The entire discussion will be at the macroscopic level, at which a porous medium domain is visualized as a homogenized continuum.     

细颗粒泥沙净冲刷和输移的大涡模拟研究

在传统水沙输移数值模拟研究中一般采用雷诺时均模拟技术(Reynolds-averaged simulation,RANS).与RANS相比,大涡模拟技术(large eddy simulation,LES)能够更加精确反映细部流动结构,计算机的发展使得采用LES探讨水流和泥沙运动规律成为可能.本文尝试给出净冲刷条件下悬沙计算的边界条件,采用动态亚格子模式对循环槽道和长槽道中的水流运动和泥沙输移进行了三维大涡模拟研究.利用直接数值模拟(direct numerical simulation,DNS)结果对LES模型进行了率定,计算结果符合良好,在此基础上初步探讨了泥沙浓度、湍动强度和湍动通量等的分布特征.结果表明,净冲刷条件下输沙平衡时泥沙浓度符合Rouse公式分布,单向流动中泥沙浓度沿着流向逐渐增大.泥沙浓度湍动强度和湍动通量都在近底部达到最大值,沿着垂向迅速减小.湍动黏性系数和扩散系数基本上在水深中间处达到最大.湍动Schmidt数沿着水深方向不是常数,在近底部和自由水面附近较大,在水深中间处较小.     

Experimental studies of a double-pipe helical heat exchanger

An experimental study of a double-pipe helical heat exchanger was performed. Two heat exchanger sizes and both parallel flow and counterflow configurations were tested. Flow rates in the inner tube and in the annulus were varied and temperature data recorded. Overall heat transfer coefficients were calculated and heat transfer coefficients in the inner tube and the annulus were determined using Wilson plots. Nusselt numbers were calculated for the inner tube and the annulus. The inner Nusselt number was compared to the literature values. Though the boundary conditions were different, a reasonable comparison was found. The Nusselt number in the annulus was compared to the numerical data. The experimental data fit well with the numerical for the larger heat exchanger. But, there were some differences between the numerical and experimental data for the smaller coil; however these differences may have been due to the nature of the Wilson plots. Overall, for the most part the results confirmed the validation of previous numerical work.     

Transport coefficients for a partially ionized two-temperature plasma with ions and neutral particles having different masses

The viscosity, heat-conduction, and diffusion coefficients are calculated for a two-temperature three-component plasma composed of ions, neutral particles and electrons when the masses of the ions m_i and neutral particles m_a are different. Similar transport coefficients for m_i=m_a were calculated in [1–3]. The numerical values obtained for the transport coefficients are compared with the values calculated from the formulas of [1–3]. Numerical calculations are carried out for helium with a cesium additive (m_i>m_a) and for krypton with a lithium additive (m_ia).Finally, the author is grateful to V. V. Gogosov, under whose direction this work was carried out.     

Experimental investigation of the flow pattern,pressure drop and void fraction of two-phase flow in the corrugated gap of a plate heat exchanger

The two-phase flow in the corrugated gap created by two adjacent plates of a plate heat exchanger was investigated experimentally. One setup consisting of a transparent corrugated gap was used to visualize the two-phase flow pattern and study the local phenomena of phase distribution, pressure drop and void fraction. Saturated two-phase R365mfc and an air-water mixture were used as working fluids.In a second experimental setup, the heat transfer coefficients and the pressure drop inside an industrial plate heat exchanger during the condensation process of R134a are determined. Both experimental setups use the same type of plates, so the experimental results can be connected and a flow pattern model for the condensation in plate heat exchangers can be derived. In this work the results of the flow pattern visualization, the two-phase pressure drop in the corrugated gap and the void fraction analysis by measurement of the electrical capacity are presented. A new pressure drop correlation is derived, which takes into account different flow patterns, that appear during condensation. The mean deviation of the presented pressure drop model compared to the experimental data and data from other experimental works is 18.9%. 81.7% of the calculated pressure drop lies within ±30% compared to the experimental data.     

The inverse problem of determining the filtration function and permeability reduction in flow of water with particles in porous media

Deep bed filtration of particle suspensions in porous media occurs during water injection into oil reservoirs, drilling fluid invasion of reservoir production zones, fines migration in oil fields, industrial filtering, bacteria, viruses or contaminants transport in groundwater etc. The basic features of the process are particle capture by the porous medium and consequent permeability reduction. Models for deep bed filtration contain two quantities that represent rock and fluid properties: the filtration function, which is the fraction of particles captured per unit particle path length, and formation damage function, which is the ratio between reduced and initial permeabilities. These quantities cannot be measured directly in the laboratory or in the field; therefore, they must be calculated indirectly by solving inverse problems. The practical petroleum and environmental engineering purpose is to predict injectivity loss and particle penetration depth around wells. Reliable prediction requires precise knowledge of these two coefficients. In this work we determine these quantities from pressure drop and effluent concentration histories measured in one-dimensional laboratory experiments. The recovery method consists of optimizing deviation functionals in appropriate subdomains; if necessary, a Tikhonov regularization term is added to the functional. The filtration function is recovered by optimizing a non-linear functional with box constraints; this functional involves the effluent concentration history. The permeability reduction is recovered likewise, taking into account the filtration function already found, and the functional involves the pressure drop history. In both cases, the functionals are derived from least square formulations of the deviation between experimental data and quantities predicted by the model.     

Chapman–Enskog solutions to arbitrary order in Sonine polynomials IV: Summational expressions for the diffusion- and thermal conductivity-related bracket integrals

The Chapman–Enskog solutions of the Boltzmann equations provide a basis for the computation of important transport coefficients for both simple gases and gas mixtures. These coefficients include the viscosity, the thermal conductivity, and the diffusion coefficient. In a preceding paper on simple gases, we have shown that the use of higher-order Sonine polynomial expansions enables one to obtain results of arbitrary precision that are free of numerical error. In two subsequent papers, we have extended our original simple gas work to encompass binary gas mixture computations of the viscosity, thermal conductivity, diffusion, and thermal diffusion coefficients to high-order. In all of this previous work we retained the full dependence of our solutions on the molecular masses, the molecular sizes, the mole fractions, and the intermolecular potential model via the omega integrals up to the final point of solution via matrix inversion. The elements of the matrices to be inverted are, in each case, determined by appropriate combinations of bracket integrals which contain, in general form, all of the various dependencies. Since accurate, explicit, general expressions for bracket integrals are not available in the literature beyond order 3, and since such general expressions are necessary for any extensive program of computations of the transport coefficients involving Sonine polynomial expansions to higher orders, we have investigated alternative methods of constructing appropriately general bracket integral expressions that do not rely on the term-by-term, expansion and pattern matching techniques that we developed for our previous work. It is our purpose in this paper to report the results of our efforts to obtain useful, alternative, general expressions for the bracket integrals associated with the diffusion- and thermal conductivity-related Chapman–Enskog solutions for gas mixtures. Specifically, we have obtained such expressions in summational form that are conducive to use in high-order transport coefficient computations for arbitrary gas mixtures and have computed and reported explicit expressions for all of the orders up to 5.     

高耸异型烟囱结构风压和风振系数试验研究

本文在模拟的大气边界层中,对某一发电厂高耸异型烟囱的刚性模型进行了测压试验研究,得到了这一结构的平均风压系数、最大和最小风压系数分布,以及该结构的风荷载体型系数;结果表明在烟囱外形明显变化的局部区域,风压绝对值较大,与理论分析一致。同时,对动态测力试验模型进行了高频动态天平测力试验研究,详细介绍了试验及数据处理方法,根据试验结果计算得到了该烟囱在风作用下的动力响应和风振系数;根据试验结果计算所得的风振系数值大于按规范公式估算值。这些结果不仅为结构的风荷载计算提供了依据,也有助于进一步认识该类异性烟囱结构的风荷载和风振特性。     

Experimental determination of correlations for average heat transfer coefficients in heat exchangers on both fluid sides

This paper presents an experimental–numerical method for determining heat transfer coefficients in cross-flow heat exchangers with extended heat exchange surfaces. Coefficients in the correlations defining heat transfer on the liquid- and air-side were determined based on experimental data using a non-linear regression method. Correlation coefficients were determined from the condition that the weighted sum of squared liquid and air temperature differences at the heat exchanger outlet, obtained by measurements and those calculated, achieved minimum. Minimum of the sum of the squares was found using the Levenberg–Marquardt method. The uncertainty in estimated parameters was determined using the error propagation rule by Gauss. The outlet temperature of the liquid and air leaving the heat exchanger was calculated using an analytical model of the heat exchanger.     

砂土串囊式充气锚杆承载力的研究

在砂土地层中,串囊式充气锚杆的研究还比较少,其承载特性及受力机理尚不明确。本文基于莫尔-库仑模型和Vesic圆孔扩张理论法,分别对圆柱体、球体、组合体、椭球体假设下的串囊式充气锚杆的扩大段进行计算分析。并将计算结果与试验得到的实测值进行对比。结果表明:四种形状假设中椭球体的形状假设理论值与实测值的误差最小,仅为8.35%。通过拟合试验数据,并引入与端阻力和侧摩阻力有关的两个系数对承载力公式进行修正,得到了抗拔承载力的经验公式。     

Fast X-ray Micro-Tomography of Multiphase Flow in Berea Sandstone: A Sensitivity Study on Image Processing

Synchrotron-based fast micro-tomography is the method of choice to observe in situ multiphase flow and displacement dynamics on the pore scale. However, the image processing workflow is sensitive to a suite of manually selected parameters which can lead to ambiguous results. In this work, the relationship between porosity and permeability in response to systematically varied gray-scale threshold values was studied for different segmentation approaches on a dataset of Berea sandstone at a voxel length of 3  \(\upmu \) m. For validation of the image processing workflow, porosity, permeability, and capillary pressure were compared to laboratory measurements on a larger-sized core plug of the same material. It was found that for global thresholding, minor variations in the visually permissive range lead to large variations in porosity and even larger variations in permeability. The latter is caused by changes in the pore-scale flow paths. Pore throats were found to be open for flow at large thresholds but closed for smaller thresholds. Watershed-based segmentation was found to be significantly more robust to manually chosen input parameters. Permeability and capillary pressure closely match experimental values; for capillary pressure measurements, the plateau of calculated capillary pressure curves was similar to experimental curves. Modeling on structures segmented with hysteresis thresholding was found to overpredict experimental capillary pressure values, while calculated permeability showed reasonable agreement to experimental data. This demonstrates that a good representation of permeability or capillary pressure alone is not a sufficient quality criterion for appropriate segmentation, but the data should be validated with both parameters. However, porosity is the least reliable quality criterion. In the segmented images, always a lower porosity was found compared to experimental values due to micro-porosity below the imaging resolution. As a result, it is recommended to base the validation of image processing workflows on permeability and capillary pressure and not on porosity. Decane-brine distributions from a multiphase flow experiment were modeled in a thus validated \(\upmu \) -CT pore space using a morphological approach which captures only capillary forces. A good overall correspondence was found when comparing (capillary-controlled) equilibrium fluid distributions before and after pore-scale displacement events.     

Chapman–Enskog solutions to arbitrary order in Sonine polynomials V: Summational expressions for the viscosity-related bracket integrals

The Chapman–Enskog solutions of the Boltzmann equations provide a basis for the computation of important transport coefficients for both simple gases and gas mixtures. These coefficients include the viscosity, the thermal conductivity, and the diffusion coefficient. In a preceding paper on simple gases (I), we have shown that the use of higher-order Sonine polynomial expansions enables one to obtain results of arbitrary precision that are free of numerical error. In two subsequent papers (II–III), we extended our original simple gas work to encompass binary gas mixture computations of the viscosity, thermal conductivity, diffusion, and thermal diffusion coefficients to high-order. In a fourth paper (IV) we derived general summational representations for the diffusion- and thermal conductivity-related bracket integrals and provided compact, explicit expressions for all of these bracket integrals needed to compute the diffusion- and thermal conductivity-related transport coefficients up to order 5 in the Sonine polynomial expansions used. In all of this previous work we retained the full dependence of our solutions on the molecular masses, the molecular sizes, the mole fractions, and the intermolecular potential model via the omega integrals up to the final point of solution via matrix inversion. The elements of the matrices to be inverted are, in each case, determined by appropriate combinations of bracket integrals which contain, in general form, all of the various dependencies. Since accurate expressions for the needed bracket integrals have not previously been available in the literature beyond orders 2 or 3, and since such expressions are necessary for any extensive program of computations of the transport coefficients involving Sonine polynomial expansions to higher orders, we have investigated alternative methods of constructing appropriately general bracket integral expressions that do not rely on the term-by-term, expansion and pattern matching techniques that we developed for our previous work. It is our purpose in this paper to report the results of our efforts to obtain useful, alternative, general expressions for the bracket integrals associated with the viscosity-related Chapman–Enskog solutions for gas mixtures. Specifically, we have obtained such expressions in summational form that are conducive to use in high-order viscosity coefficient computations for arbitrary gas mixtures and have computed and reported explicit expressions for all of the orders up to 5.     

SEMILLAC: A new hybrid atomic model of hot dense plasmas

SEMILLAC is a fast, yet highly accurate method to calculate ionic population distributions in plasmas at a given electron temperature and density. SEMILLAC solves rate equations for non-relativistic configurations population distributions. It considers electron collisional, radiative and autoionizing atomic processes. The code is designed to be highly versatile so it can be used for modeling a wide range of laboratory plasmas. The population distributions can be calculated for steady state or time dependent conditions, with or without the presence of a radiation field. SEMILLAC is designed to be used as a tool for population distributions calculations and spectroscopic modeling of plasmas. Our aim is to get high accuracy while keeping the code fast enough to be used for standard PC calculations. At the heart of our method, average transitions energies and rate coefficients are calculated for a restricted set of simple non-relativistic ionic configurations using the HULLAC code. We then use this basic set to calculate energies and rates coefficients of more complex, multiply excited configurations.     

Improved methods for linear estimation of velocity records

Traditionally, linear mean-square (MS or stochastic) estimation coefficients are calculated using cross-correlations between each of the data at reference and estimation locations. Since the cross-correlation between data at reference and estimation locations typically decreases rapidly with increasing separation distance, the resulting estimated fluctuations diminish away from the reference locations. Two new schemes have been developed to optimally determine estimation coefficients which yield an improved estimated energy representation. One approach involves a non-linear least-square fit toboth the estimation covariance and the cross-correlation between data at reference and estimation locations. By also minimizing the error in the estimation covariance, realistic energy levels can be estimated without significantly altering the correlation between true and estimated velocity signals as given by the traditional MS method. Another scheme, developed for use with a single-point, two-component reference, maximizes the correlation coefficient between the estimate and its measured counterpart. It is shown that for this simple case, the estimated covariance can be setequal to the measured covariance without compromising the correlation coefficientat all. The effectiveness of the proposed techniques is demonstrated by comparing their estimates with those given by the MS method in a plane turbulent mixing layer. In general, the estimation schemes appear to give improved results when references from the edge of the mixing layer are employed. It is also demonstrated how the results of the proposed estimation methods can be used to infer details regarding the mixing layer structure and kinematics. This work was conducted in the Fluid Mechanics Laboratory, NASA Ames Research Center and was supported by the NASA Ames Research Center — Stanford University, Center for Turbulence Research, Postdoctoral Fellowship Program.