Experimental study of void space, permeability and elastic anisotropy in crustal rocks under ambient and hydrostatic pressure.

Anisotropy in the physical and transport properties of crustal rocks is a key influence on crustal evolution and energy resource management. Data from deep seismic soundings, borehole logging and laboratory measurement all show that the physical properties of the earth are anisotropic. Such anisotropy generally results from the superposition of fabric development during diagenesis and/or petrogenesis, and the application of anisotropic tectonic stresses. This leads to an aligned crack and pore fabric in crustal rocks that, in turn, leads to seismic velocity anisotropy and permeability anisotropy. This thesis describes an experimental study which aims to investigate the relationships between pressure, pore fabric geometry and seismic and permeability anisotropy under hydrostatic pressures from room pressure to ~4km depth equivalence within the Earth's crust. Firstly, pore fabric analyses of three representative crustal rock types is presented. These rock types represent a range of crack and pore fabrics. The average void space shape and orientation is determined 3-D using the methods of anisotropy of magnetic susceptibility and velocity anisotropy. Scanning electron microscopy and fluorescent-dye crack imaging techniques further aid in the void space characterisation. Secondly, the development and application of an apparatus capable of contemporaneously measuring elastic wave velocity, porosity and permeability at effective pressures of up to 100 MPa is described. Results are analysed in terms of applied effective pressure and the rock pore fabric type and orientation. Finally, the laboratory data are used to test models that attempt to predict geophysical parameters such as permeability and elastic wave velocity from microstructural attributes. This multi-facetted analysis allows a number of conclusions to be drawn, expanding the state-of-the-art in how the pore fabric microstructure of crustal rock is represented by the methods of elastic wave velocity and porosity, with reference to the hydrostatic confining pressure and hence the burial conditions of the rock

Seismo‐Mechanical Response of Anisotropic Rocks Under Hydraulic Fracture Conditions: New Experimental Insights

Unconventional hydrocarbon resources found across the world are driving a renewed interest in mudrock hydraulic fracturing methods. However, given the difficulty in safely measuring the various controlling factors in a natural environment, considerable challenges remain in understanding the fracture process. To investigate, we report a new laboratory study that simulates hydraulic fracturing using a conventional triaxial apparatus. We show that fracture orientation is primarily controlled by external stress conditions and the inherent rock anisotropy and fabric are critical in governing fracture initiation, propagation, and geometry. We use anisotropic Nash Point Shale (NPS) from the early Jurassic with high elastic P wave anisotropy (56%) and mechanical tensile anisotropy (60%), and highly anisotropic (cemented) Crab Orchard Sandstone with P wave/tensile anisotropies of 12% and 14%, respectively. Initiation of tensile fracture requires 36 MPa for NPS at 1‐km simulated depth and 32 MPa for Crab Orchard Sandstone, in both cases with cross‐bedding favorable orientated. When unfavorably orientated, this increases to 58 MPa for NPS at 800‐m simulated depth, far higher as fractures must now traverse cross‐bedding. We record a swarm of acoustic emission activity, which exhibits spectral power peaks at 600 and 100 kHz suggesting primary fracture and fluid‐rock resonance, respectively. The onset of the acoustic emission data precedes the dynamic instability of the fracture by 0.02 s, which scales to ~20 s for ~100‐m size fractures. We conclude that a monitoring system could become not only a forecasting tool but also a means to control the fracking process to prevent avoidable seismic events

Vehicle Collision Avoidance System Using Li-Fi

In recent times, large numbers of road accidents occurring all over the world are mainly due to collisions between vehicles. More than 1.2 million peoples were died in road accidents in 2019, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). Human safety features are much needed in the manufacturing of vehicles. The proposed method mainly focuses on reducing the number of accidents in our daily lives by avoiding collision between the vehicles. There are several factors corresponding to such difficult conditions that may results in death or disabilities. The causes are sudden loss of concentration of the driver, braking failure and stability issues. These criteria can be reduced only if there is a possibility for communication between the vehicles and the drivers in order to avoid accidents. There are various vehicular communication system models like Dedicated Short Range Communication and Vehicular Ad-Hoc network operating less than 5.9 GHz. These radio frequency based communication also has some limitations such as interference, congested spectrum and security. These drawbacks can be reduced by implementing the Visible Light Communication (VLC) in vehicles. It provides larger bandwidth, security, interference immunity, and high data rate. High speed data transmission and reception can be achieved using visible light based data communication system. This technology is known as Light Fidelity (Li-Fi). This chapter presents the innovative method to evade collision between two vehicles (rear and front). This communication system is cost effective with high speed data rate capabilities

Entangled Photons from Small Quantum Dots

We discuss level schemes of small quantum-dot turnstiles and their applicability in the production of entanglement in two-photon emission. Due to the large energy splitting of the single-electron levels, only one single electron level and one single hole level can be made resonant with the levels in the conduction band and valence band. This results in a model with nine distinct levels, which are split by the Coulomb interactions. We show that the optical selection rules are different for flat and tall cylindrically symmetric dots, and how this affects the quality of the entanglement generated in the decay of the biexciton state. The effect of charge carrier tunneling and of a resonant cavity is included in the model.Comment: 10 pages, 8 figure

Thermal damage and pore pressure effects of the brittle-ductile transition in comiso limestone

Volcanic edifices are commonly unstable, with magmatic and non‐magmatic fluid circulation, and elevated temperature gradients having influence on the mechanical strength of edifice and basement rocks. We present new mechanical characterization of the Comiso limestone of the Mount Etna Volcano (Italy) basement to constrain the effects of regional ambient conditions associated with the volcanic system: the effects of pore fluid on rock strength and the effects of distal magmatic heating (~20 °C to 600 °C) at a range of simulated depths (0.2 to 2.0 km). The presence of water promotes ductile behaviour at shallow depths and causes a significant reduction in brittle rock strength compared to dry conditions. Thermal stressing, in which specimens were heated and cooled before mechanical testing at room temperature, has a variable effect for dry and saturated cases. In dry conditions, thermal stressing up to 450 °C homogenizes the strength of the specimen such that the majority of the specimens exhibit the same peak stress; at 600 °C, the brittle failure is promoted at lower differential stress. The presence of water in thermally‐stressed specimens promotes ductile behaviour and reduces peak strength. Acoustic emission monitoring suggests that accumulated damage is associated with the heating–cooling sequence, particularly in the 300–450‐600°C. Based on conduction modeling, we estimate this temperature range could affect basement rocks up to 300 m away from minor sheet intrusions and much further with larger bodies. Considering the dyke spacing beneath Etna, these conditions may apply to a significant percentage of the basement, promoting ductile behaviour at relatively shallow depths

An FPTAS for optimizing a class of low-rank functions over a polytope

We present a fully polynomial time approximation scheme (FPTAS) for optimizing a very general class of non-linear functions of low rank over a polytope. Our approximation scheme relies on constructing an approximate Pareto-optimal front of the linear functions which constitute the given low-rank function. In contrast to existing results in the literature, our approximation scheme does not require the assumption of quasi-concavity on the objective function. For the special case of quasi-concave function minimization, we give an alternative FPTAS, which always returns a solution which is an extreme point of the polytope. Our technique can also be used to obtain an FPTAS for combinatorial optimization problems with non-linear objective functions, for example when the objective is a product of a fixed number of linear functions. We also show that it is not possible to approximate the minimum of a general concave function over the unit hypercube to within any factor, unless P = NP. We prove this by showing a similar hardness of approximation result for supermodular function minimization, a result that may be of independent interest

On the reliability of a simple method for scoring phenotypes to estimate heritability: A case study with pupal color in Heliconius erato phyllis, Fabricius 1775 (Lepidoptera, Nymphalidae)

In this paper, two methods for assessing the degree of melanization of pupal exuviae from the butterfly Heliconius erato phyllis, Fabricius 1775 (Lepidoptera, Nymphalidae, Heliconiini) are compared. In the first method, which was qualitative, the exuviae were classified by scoring the degree of melanization, whereas in the second method, which was quantitative, the exuviae were classified by optical density followed by analysis with appropriate software. The heritability (h2) of the degree of melanization was estimated by regression and analysis of variance. The estimates of h 2 were similar with both methods, indicating that the qualitative method could be particularly suitable for field work. The low estimates obtained for heritability may have resulted from the small sample size (n = 7-18 broods, including the parents) or from the allocation-priority hypothesis in which pupal color would be a lower priority trait compared to morphological traits and adequate larval development

Measurement of the Bs0→J/ψKS0B_s^0\to J/\psi K_S^0 branching fraction

The $B_s^0\to J/\psi K_S^0$ branching fraction is measured in a data sample corresponding to 0.41$fb^{-1}$ of integrated luminosity collected with the LHCb detector at the LHC. This channel is sensitive to the penguin contributions affecting the sin2$\beta$ measurement from $B^0\to J/\psi K_S^0$ The time-integrated branching fraction is measured to be $BF(B_s^0\to J/\psi K_S^0)=(1.83\pm0.28)\times10^{-5}$. This is the most precise measurement to date

Model-independent search for CP violation in D0→K−K+π−π+ and D0→π−π+π+π− decays

A search for CP violation in the phase-space structures of D0 and View the MathML source decays to the final states K−K+π−π+ and π−π+π+π− is presented. The search is carried out with a data set corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 1.0 fb−1 collected in 2011 by the LHCb experiment in pp collisions at a centre-of-mass energy of 7 TeV. For the K−K+π−π+ final state, the four-body phase space is divided into 32 bins, each bin with approximately 1800 decays. The p-value under the hypothesis of no CP violation is 9.1%, and in no bin is a CP asymmetry greater than 6.5% observed. The phase space of the π−π+π+π− final state is partitioned into 128 bins, each bin with approximately 2500 decays. The p-value under the hypothesis of no CP violation is 41%, and in no bin is a CP asymmetry greater than 5.5% observed. All results are consistent with the hypothesis of no CP violation at the current sensitivity

Absolute luminosity measurements with the LHCb detector at the LHC

Absolute luminosity measurements are of general interest for colliding-beam experiments at storage rings. These measurements are necessary to determine the absolute cross-sections of reaction processes and are valuable to quantify the performance of the accelerator. Using data taken in 2010, LHCb has applied two methods to determine the absolute scale of its luminosity measurements for proton-proton collisions at the LHC with a centre-of-mass energy of 7 TeV. In addition to the classic "van der Meer scan" method a novel technique has been developed which makes use of direct imaging of the individual beams using beam-gas and beam-beam interactions. This beam imaging method is made possible by the high resolution of the LHCb vertex detector and the close proximity of the detector to the beams, and allows beam parameters such as positions, angles and widths to be determined. The results of the two methods have comparable precision and are in good agreement. Combining the two methods, an overall precision of 3.5% in the absolute luminosity determination is reached. The techniques used to transport the absolute luminosity calibration to the full 2010 data-taking period are presented.Comment: 48 pages, 19 figures. Results unchanged, improved clarity of Table 6, 9 and 10 and corresponding explanation in the tex