Capillary condensation-induced anomalous water sorption in urethane-based coatings exposed to high humidity conditions

In this work, the water uptake of crosslinked urethane-based coatings in high humidity conditions as a function of crosslinking temperature was investigated. The water uptake values were measured using an electrochemical impedance spectroscopy technique by applying the Brasher–Kingsbury procedure. Water uptake values as high as 200% were observed in the current research. These anomalous results were explained based on capillary condensation of diffused water molecules in the nano-metrically (or nano-scale) rough hydrophilic surfaces of the pores formed by thermal degradation of the polyurethane network. The water uptake value is at its minimum when an effectively pore-free tight network formed at moderate crosslinking conditions.     

Fuzzy modeling techniques and artificial neural networks to estimate annual energy output of a wind turbine

The purpose of this article is to develop a new method to estimate annual energy output for a given wind turbine in any region which should be easy to use and has satisfactory accuracy. To do this, hourly wind speeds of 25 different stations in Netherlands, output power curve of S47 wind turbine and fuzzy modeling techniques and artificial neural networks were used and a model is developed to estimate annual energy output for S47 wind turbine in different regions. Since this model has three inputs (average wind speed, standard deviation of wind speed, and air density of that region), this model is easy to use. The accuracy of this method is compared with the accuracy of conventional methods and it is shown that this new method performs better. Thereafter, we have shown that by making some small changes to this proposed model, other pitch control wind turbines could be modeled too. As an example, we have modeled E82 wind turbine based on the model developed for S47 and it is shown that this model has still satisfactory accuracy.     

Optimization of the water-based road-marking paint by experimental design, mixture method

The main purpose of this research is formulating and optimizing a new road-marking paint which is an environmentally friendly product. This paint is produced with an emulsion of an acrylic copolymer and contains the least of the volatile organic compounds. The formulation and optimization procedure is carried out on the base of experimental design by the method of mixture in which the important paint properties are modeled by using special cubic model. The present method has the capability of investigation the effect of raw materials at different levels with fewer experiments than factorial and fractional factorial design.

In this research, the main parameters such as resin, pigment and filler were selected at different levels, and different samples were prepared by combination of additives and other required reagents. The properties of wet and dry films of the samples were determined using ASTM test methods. Different responses such as pigment volume concentration (PVC), latex critical pigment volume concentration (LCPVC), abrasion resistance, hardness, gloss, no pick up time and surface drying time, were selected as the objective functions of this study. By running DX6 software, using special cubic model and selection of desired range of end-use properties, the region of optimum paint formula was determined.

The accuracy of the model was examined by preparing a sample in optimized region and by determining its final properties, experimentally. The results exhibit a good agreement between the model and experimental measurements. This product was compared with commercial solvent based traffic paint and good quality was reported in end-use properties.     

Porosity prediction from seismic inversion of a similarity attribute based on a pseudo-forward equation (PFE): a case study from the North Sea Basin, Netherlands

The objective of this work is to implement a pseudo-forward equation which is called PFE to transform data (similarity attribute) to model parameters (porosity) in a gas reservoir in the F3 block of North Sea. This equation which is an experimental model has unknown constants in its structure; hence, a least square solution is applied to find the best constants. The results derived from solved equations show that the errors on measured data are mapped into the errors of estimated constants; hence, Tikhonov regularization is used to improve the estimated parameters. The results are compared with a conventional method such as cross plotting between acoustic impedance and porosity values to validate the PFE model. When the testing dataset in sand units was used, the correlation coefficient between two variables (actual and predicted values) was obtained as 0.720 and 0.476 for PFE model and cross-plotting analysis, respectively. Therefore, the testing dataset validates relatively well the PFE optimized by Tikhonov regularization in sand units of a gas reservoir. The obtained results indicate that PFE could provide initial information about sandstone reservoirs. It could estimate reservoir porosity distribution approximately and it highlights bright spots and fault structures such as gas chimneys and salt edges.     

Mechanism of the reversibility of asphaltene precipitation in crude oil

Asphaltene precipitation and deposition occur in petroleum reservoirs as a change in pressure, temperature and liquid phase composition and reduce the oil recovery considerably. In addition to these, asphaltene precipitates may deposit in the pore spaces of reservoir rock and form plugging, which is referred to as a type of formation damage, i.e. permeability reduction. In all cases above, it is of great importance to know under which conditions the asphaltenes precipitate and to what extent precipitated asphaltenes can be re-dissolved. In other words, to what extent the process of asphaltene precipitation is reversible with respect to change in thermodynamic conditions. In present work, a series of experiments was designed and carried out to quantitatively distinguish the reversibility of asphaltene precipitation upon the change in pressure, temperature and liquid composition. Experiments were conducted in non-porous media. Generally it was observed that the asphaltene precipitation is a partial reversible process for oil under study upon temperature change with hysteresis. However, the precipitation of asphaltene as a function of mixture composition and pressure is nearly reversible with a little hysteresis.     

DC and AC electrical conductivity of electro-deposited carbon-black–epoxy composite films

Carbon-black–epoxy composite films were prepared by cathodic electro-deposition of a dispersion containing carbon black and epoxy resins. The films, after baking at elevated temperature, show a semi-conducting behavior. Using DC conductivity measurements it was possible to determine the glass transition temperature of the samples, the conductivities of which lie in the sensitivity range of the instrument. Conductive samples show a positive temperature coefficient both below and above T_g. Based on the electrical impedance data extracted from the electrochemical impedance spectra, the exponents x and y were determined for the frequency dependence of the complex conductivity and complex dielectric constant as 0.8 and 0.2, respectively. These values are in good agreement with the classical values of x = 0.72 and y = 0.28. It was also found that these exponents are the same for all the CCB contents studied.     

Evaluation of a permeability–porosity relationship in a low-permeability creeping material using a single transient test

A method is presented for the evaluation of the permeability–porosity relationship in a low-permeability porous material using the results of a single transient test. This method accounts for both elastic and non-elastic deformations of the sample during the test, and is applied to a hardened class G oil well cement paste. An initial hydrostatic undrained loading is applied to the sample. The generated excess pore pressure is then released at one end of the sample while monitoring the pore pressure at the other end and the radial strain in the middle of the sample during the dissipation of the pore pressure. These measurements are back-analysed to evaluate the permeability and its evolution with porosity change. The effect of creep of the sample during the test on the measured pore pressure and volume change is taken into account in the analysis. This approach permits to calibrate a power law permeability–porosity relationship for the tested hardened cement paste. The porosity sensitivity exponent of the power–law is evaluated equal to 11, and is shown to be mostly independent of the stress level and of the creep strains.     

Effective stress law for the permeability of a limestone

The effective stress law for the permeability of a limestone is studied experimentally by performing constant-head permeability tests in a triaxial cell with different conditions of confining pressure σ and pore pressure p_f. Test results show that a pore pressure increase and a confining pressure decrease both result in an increase of the permeability, and that the effect of the pore pressure change on the variation of the permeability is more important than the effect of a change of the confining pressure. A power law is proposed for the variation of the permeability with the effective stress (σ′=σ–n_kp_f). The permeability-effective stress coefficient n_k increases linearly with the differential pressure and is greater than unity as soon as the differential pressure exceeds few bars. The test results are well reproduced using the proposed permeability-effective stress law. A conceptual pore-shell model based on a detailed observation of the microstructure of the studied limestone is proposed. This model is able to explain the experimental observations on the effect of the total stress and of the pore pressure on the permeability of the limestone. Effective stress coefficients for the stress-dependent permeability which are greater than one are obtained. It is shown that the controlling factor is the ratio of the different bulk moduli of the various constituents of the rock. This ratio is studied experimentally by performing microhardness tests.     

Improved impossible differential and biclique cryptanalysis of HIGHT

HIGHT is a lightweight block cipher introduced in CHES 2006 by Hong et al as a block cipher suitable for low‐resource applications. In this paper, we propose improved impossible differential and biclique attacks on HIGHT block cipher both exploiting the permutation‐based property of the cipher's key schedule algorithm as well as its low diffusion. For impossible differential attack, we found a new 17‐round impossible differential characteristic that enables us to propose a new 27‐round impossible differential attack. The total time complexity of the attack is 2^120.4 where an amount of 2^59.3 chosen plaintext‐ciphertext pairs and 2^107.4 memory are required. We also instantiate a new biclique cryptanalysis of HIGHT, which is based on the new idea of splitting each of the forward and backward keys into 2 parts where the computations associated to each one are performed independently. The time complexity and data complexity of this attack are 2^125.7 and 2⁴², respectively. To the best of our knowledge, this is the fastest biclique attack on full‐round HIGHT.     

Selective laser melting raw material commoditization: impact on comparative competitiveness of additive manufacturing

The paper analyses the impact of cheaper metal powder supplies on the comparative competitiveness of additive manufacturing (AM). By utilising two case studies, we compare the economic impact of an innovative titanium extraction method on Selective Laser Melting (SLM) and conventional methods of machining and casting. A switch-over analysis identifies the production quantities above which conventional manufacturing is more cost competitive than additive manufacturing. This analysis is performed for current raw material as well as cheaper raw material supply. The results illustrate the improved comparative competitiveness of SLM as the titanium supply is commoditised and more readily available in powder form. The responsiveness of the supply chain is improved as the switch-over point between SLM and conventional methods increases. Moreover, as the raw material supply chain for titanium is transformed through the use of this novel extraction method, the manufacturing supply chain is simplified.