Development and testing of advanced methods for the screening of Enhanced-Oil-Recovery techniques

Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR) techniques must undergo preliminary laboratory and pilot testing before implementation to field-wide scale, and the whole evaluation process requires heavy investments. Hence forecasting EOR potential is a key decision-making element. A critical difference amongst EOR techniques resides in the oil-displacement mechanism upon which they are based. The effectiveness of these mechanisms depends on oil and reservoir properties. As such, similar EOR techniques are typically successful in fields sharing similar features. Here we implement and test a screening method aimed at estimating the optimal EOR technique for a target reservoir. Our approach relies on the information content tied to an exhaustive set of EOR field experiences. The basic screening criterion is the analogy with known reservoir settings in terms of oil and formation properties. Analogy is assessed by grouping fields into clusters: we rely on a Bayesian hierarchical clustering algorithm, whose main advantage is that the number of clusters is not set a priori but stems from data statistics. As a test bed, we perform a blind test of our screening approach by considering 2 fields operated by eni. Our predictions for analogy assessment are in agreement with the EOR techniques applied or planned in these fields

Role of enhanced glomerular synthesis of thromboxane A2 in progressive kidney disease

Role of enhanced glomerular synthesis of thromboxane A2 in progressive kidney disease. Normotensive rats of the Milan strain (MNS) spontaneously develop focal glomerulosclerosis. In order to explore the contribution of glomerular thromboxane (TX) A2 synthesis to the development of the disease, we have characterized the time course of renal functional and biochemical changes, and their modification by long-term treatment with a TX-synthase inhibitor. Oral administration (150mg · kg-1 from 1 to 14 months of age) of FCE 22178 suppressed enhanced glomerular TXB2 production at all experimental times (mean inhibition 80%) and proteinuria (varying between 27.1 and 73.0%) while preserving renal blood flow and glomerular filtration rate. These effects of TX-synthase inhibition were seen in the absence of any statistically significant changes in systemic blood pressure. Moreover, FCE 22178 had no antihypertensive effects in hypertensive rats of the Milan strain (MHS) nor in spontaneously hypertensive rats (SHR). Treatment also prevented the age-related hypoalbuminemia and hyperlipidemia observed in control MNS and significantly (P < 0.01) reduced glomerular histologic damage, as demonstrated by light microscopy studies and measurement of sclerotic area. We conclude that: 1) MNS rats provide an animal model of long-lasting proteinuria characterized by an age-related increase in glomerular TXB2 production paralleled by progressive loss of renal structural integrity and function and by a secondary dyslipidemia; 2) pharmacological inhibition of glomerular TX-synthase attenuates the structural as well as the functional expression of kidney disease, without a primary effect on systemic blood pressure. These data are suggestive of an important modulating role of TXA2 in the progression of MNS renal disease

Modelling and Simulation of the Supercritical Adsorption of Complex Terpene Mixtures

CHEM. ENG. SCI

Benefits sought by citizens and channel attitudes for multichannel payment services: Evidence from Italy

Together with the digitalization of government services, a considerable amount of countries, and Italy in particular among them, are considering the introduction of several online and offline access point to its services in order to increase the penetration of provision systems not requiring an interaction at the PA office. This study, through a two-step empirical exercise run in Italy, intends to understand the benefits sought by citizens and the channel attitudes in order to understand whether and how this orientation by policy makers, with respect to payment services, may be effective. Thanks to a suited sampling, the study sets the basis for a segmentation of the citizens in terms of benefits sought and discusses the channel attitudes within each segment identified. By analyzing the characteristics of the segments, the study presents implications for policy makers and public servants and provides a conceptual background for grounding further research on multichannel service provision

Modelling of Orange Flower Concrete Fractionation by Supercritical CO2

J. SUPERCRIT. FLUID

Measuring open innovation under uncertainty: A fuzzy logic approach

Open innovation has received growing interest in recent years, both in academia and industry. Currently, assessing the degree of openness of a company’s innovation process can be highly challenging due to many qualitative and quantitative factors with different units of measurements involved in the evaluation process. Moreover, the open innovation assessment process is affected by vagueness and uncertainty. In this paper, starting from a thorough review of the open innovation literature and following a holistic approach to open innovation assessment, a novel modular fuzzy rule based system is developed in order to help managers to evaluate the openness of their company. The proposed system allows the decision maker to assess the open innovation level of the firm by providing 19 input variables. The information is then processed by the system through 231 rules in order to compute sub-dimensions, dimensions, building blocks and finally the total degree of open innovation. Furthermore, the proposed system was tested using numerical examples and two real-world case studies of two companies. The results showed the capability of the system to assess open innovation in different scenarios, allowing the decision maker to identify the areas with strengths and weaknesses

A Novel Enhanced-Oil-Recovery Screening Approach Based on Bayesian Clustering and Principal-Component Analysis

We present and test a new screening methodology to discriminate amongst alternative and competing Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR) techniques to be considered for a given reservoir. Our work is motivated by the observation that, even if a considerable variety of EOR techniques have been successfully applied to extend oilfield production and lifetime, an EOR project requires extensive laboratory and pilot tests prior to field-wide implementation and preliminary assessment of EOR potential in a reservoir is critical in the decision-making process. Since similar EOR techniques may be successful in fields sharing some global features, as basic discrimination criteria we consider fluid (density and viscosity) and reservoir formation (porosity, permeability, depth and temperature) properties. Our approach is observation-driven and grounded on an exhaustive data-base which we compile upon considering worldwide EOR field experiences. A preliminary reduction of the dimensionality of the parameter space over which EOR projects are classified is accomplished through Principal Component Analysis (PCA). A screening of target analogs is then obtained by classification of documented EOR projects through a Bayesian clustering algorithm. Considering the cluster which comprises the EOR field under evaluation, an inter-cluster refinement is then accomplished by ordering cluster components on the basis of a weighted Euclidean distance from the target field in the (multidimensional) parameter space. Distinctive features of our methodology are that (a) all screening analyses are performed on the database projected onto the space of principal components, and (b) the fraction of variance associated with each principal component is taken as weight of the Euclidean distance we determine. As a test bed, we apply our approach on three fields operated by eni. These include light, medium and heavy-oil reservoirs, where Gas, Chemical and Thermal EOR projects have been respectively proposed. Our results are (a) conducive to the compilation of a broad and extensively usable data-base of EOR settings and (b) consistent with the field observations related to the three tested and already planned/implemented EOR methodologies, thus demonstrating the effectiveness of our approach

A New Bayesian Approach for Analogs Evaluation in Advanced EOR Screening

AbstractWe present and test a new screening methodology to discriminate amongst alternative and competing Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR) techniques to be considered for a given reservoir. Our work is motivated by the observation that, even if a considerable variety of EOR techniques have been successfully applied to extend oilfield production and lifetime, an EOR project requires extensive laboratory and pilot tests prior to field-wide implementation and preliminary assessment of EOR potential in a reservoir is critical in the decision-making process. Since similar EOR techniques may be successful in fields sharing some global features, as basic discrimination criteria we consider fluid (density and viscosity) and reservoir formation (porosity, permeability, depth and temperature) properties. Our approach is observation-driven and grounded on an exhaustive data-base which we compile upon considering worldwide EOR field experiences. A preliminary reduction of the dimensionality of the parameter space over which EOR projects are classified is accomplished through Principal Component Analysis (PCA). A screening of target analogs is then obtained by classification of documented EOR projects through a Bayesian clustering algorithm. Considering the cluster which comprises the EOR field under evaluation, an inter-cluster refinement is then accomplished by ordering cluster components on the basis of a weighted Euclidean distance from the target field in the (multidimensional) parameter space. Distinctive features of our methodology are that (a) all screening analyses are performed on the database projected onto the space of principal components, and (b) the fraction of variance associated with each principal component is taken as weight of the Euclidean distance we determine. As a test bed, we apply our approach on three fields operated by eni. These include light, medium and heavy-oil reservoirs, where Gas, Chemical and Thermal EOR projects have been respectively proposed. Our results are (a) conducive to the compilation of a broad and extensively usable data-base of EOR settings and (b) consistent with the field observations related to the three tested and already planned/implemented EOR methodologies, thus demonstrating the effectiveness of our approach.</jats:p