Abstract: The hydrolyzed polyacrylamide (HPAM) is the water-soluble polymer most often used in flooding applications. However, the temperature, salinity and hardness of the reservoirs affect its viscosifying properties reducing the sweep efficiency of the polymer solution. This work aims to tailor HPAM (Flopaam 5115SH) solutions prepared with synthetic produced water (SPW) or with distilled water only, and evaluate their rheological properties. The flow curves confirm the detrimental effects of salinity and hardness. For the target viscosity (10 mPa.s at ~7.8 s-1 and 23 °C) chosen to perform further polymer flooding tests, the required polymer concentration is 1250 ppm. At this concentration, the solution presents a thermothinning behavior as the temperature increases. Regarding the viscoelastic properties, the viscous modulus is predominant for fluids prepared with SPW, while the elastic modulus is prevalent for fluids without salts. These results contribute to the design of a polymer solution composition under interest conditions.

Abstract: An efficient soft switching interleaved boost converter with quadratic voltage gain is presented. Two boost-quadratic-topology switching cells are interleaved to minimize EMI while operating at lower switching frequency and soft switching to minimize losses. The result is a system with high conversion efficiency, able to operate in a pulse-width-modulation (PWM) way. Seven transition states of the soft switching converter in one switching period are described. In order to illustrate the operational principle key implementation details, including simulations, are described. The validity of this converter is guaranteed by the obtained results.

Abstract: An automated vision control system is a convenient integrated platform to identify defect on objects in fast production lines. Here, the proposed system is designed to detect defective gloves during fast manufacturing process thereby removing human error. The system is capable of detecting a few unique types of glove defects based on region of interest (ROI) and area of the gloves. This method has shown that the system is able to achieve an overall accuracy of 81%.

Abstract: Polymer flooding enhanced oil recovery is distinct from the other recovery methods for its ability of oil production anticipation and water circulation reduction. These enhancements are due to changes in the viscosity of the injected fluid and the permeability of the porous media. Polymer flow through porous media, however, is subject to complex phenomena such as non-Newtonian viscosity, retention mechanisms, and inaccessible pore volume. These phenomena must be addressed in laboratory experiments which often use salt tracers, although specific instrumentation and planning are required to properly quantify them. The objective of this work is the development of a cheap and easy to use computational tool to assist experimentalists. This work develops a mathematical modeling to one-phase flow of polymeric solutions in one-dimensional porous media. The transport of fluid and components (polymer and tracer) are modeled through three coupled partial differential equations. Constitutive equations are also present to model the coupled phenomena. A dimensionless numerical solution is achieved through the finite differences method and a fully implicit solution for pressure and concentration behavior is proposed. The complete model is presented and discussed to allow reproduction of the results. One experiment aimed to estimate inaccessible pore volume, retention, resistance factor and residual resistance factor is selected from the literature for a history matching. The input parameters directly taken from the experiment’s data were: fluid rheology; fluid-rock interactions; rock sample geometry and properties; and initial and boundary conditions. The only parameter up for adjustment is the moment for injection start-stop. The simulation results fitted the experimental measurements nicely. The differences are discussed in terms of validity and an enhanced analysis of the results is made possible by the model. As of this work’s novelty, the presented model proves itself as a simple and low-cost aiding tool for experimental planning and analysis in single-phase one-dimensional polymer flooding experiments in the presence of salt tracers.

Abstract: Ontologies are becoming nowadays a recurrent topic in many research areas of computer science. Among other things, they are used as best model for representing knowledge of a given field of expertise. More specifically, the evolution of Semantic Web mostly relies on the use of ontologies in describing various web resources. However, the world is changing, so do resources and knowledge. Consequently, ontologies on which are based knowledge and resources are also called to evolve. One of the solutions helping to ensure this evolution is to manage the development process in order to guarantee supported services as well as some quality requirements. Many tools have been designed to ensure designing/editing of ontologies, but none of them has enough functions to ensure their evolution. Evolution of ontology considered as its adaptation to changes in the field is a key issue in the ontology engineering field. Several studies have been focused on this problem, but proposed solutions did not manage all the side effects that may derive from the evolution. This article proposes an extension of MS-ONTO [1] called POOE. POOE not only supports the evolution effects on a double plan, externally and internally (verification of integrity constraints, quality analysis of the evolved ontology) but it constitutes a true validation tool of a change log.

Abstract: The communication model of Internet of Things (IOT) includes networks infrastructure (e.g. ultra-wideband networks, 3G and 4G networks). It also includes the adoption of IPv6 in order to provide a unique IP address to any entity involved in the network. It also comprises technologies that allow the location and identification of physical objects (e.g. RFID). There are also some other technologies that influence on the successful development of IoT applications. These technologies are computer vision, biometric systems, robotics, and others. In this paper, an elliptic curve on-line/off-line threshold digital signature scheme for Internet of Things is presented. In the proposed scheme, there are two phases for computing the digital signature of a message: off-line phase and on-line phase. The majority of the digital signature computation is performed off-line which saves power and time. We also prove that our proposed schemes have achieved the desired security requirements. Extensive simulations show that the proposed scheme is more efficient and robust compared with the one-phase elliptic curve threshold digital signature scheme.