Publications related to Oil sands

Long-term biodegradation of crude oil in high-arctic backshore sediments: The Baffin Island Oil Spill (BIOS) after nearly four decades

With an on-going disproportional warming of the Arctic Ocean and the reduction of the sea ice cover, the risk of an accidental oil spill from ships or future oil exploration is increasing. It is hence important to know how crude oil weathers in this enviro ...

2023

Perfluorocarbon emulsion enhances MR-ARFI displacement and temperature in vitro: Evaluating the response with MRI, NMR, and hydrophone

Mohamed Farhat, Davide Bernardo Preso, Ryan Holman

Sonosensitive perfluorocarbon F(8)TAC(18)-PFOB emulsion is under development to enhance heating, increase thermal contrast, and reduce treatment times during focused ultrasound tumor ablation of highly perfused tissue. The emulsion previously showed enhanc ...

FRONTIERS MEDIA SA2023

Influence of depositional fabric on mechanical properties of naturally deposited sands

Gioacchino Viggiani, Edward Carlo Giorgio Andò

Fabric characteristics and shear deformation behaviour were analysed in four intact small-scale samples, including two disturbed and two undisturbed samples of naturally deposited sand from a shoal in the San Francisco Bay. Triaxial compression tests were ...

ICE PUBLISHING2022

Swelling and shrinkage of partially saturated gas shales: from laboratory tests to an effective stress framework

Jinwoo Kim

Gas shale swelling during hydraulic stimulation is one of the major challenges in unconventional gas development. It is hypothesized that the large volumetric strain upon water imbibition is a consequence of dramatic changes in capillary pressure and disjo ...

EPFL2022

Temporary pause in the growth of atmospheric ethane and propane in 2015–2018

Hélène Paule Angot, Ilann Ernest Valentin Bourgeois

Atmospheric non-methane hydrocarbons (NMHCs) play an important role in the formation of secondary organic aerosols and ozone. After a multidecadal global decline in atmospheric mole fractions of ethane and propane – the most abundant atmospheric NMHCs – pr ...

Copernicus Publications2021

Petrophysical properties of heavy oil-bearing carbonate rocks and their implications on petroleum system evolution: Insights from the Majella Massif

Carolina Giorgetti

In this work, we investigate the role of hydrocarbons in changing the petrophysical properties of rocks by merging laboratory measurements, outcrops characterization, and subsurface data focusing on a carbonate-bearing reservoir (Bolognano Formation) of th ...

2020

Fluorinated surfactants in droplet-based microfluidics: Influence of their composition on the properties of emulsion drops

Gianluca Nicolas Etienne

Miniaturization has been a driving force in many areas of science and technology, most notably in the electronics industry. Droplet-based microfluidics, a methode to produce emulsion drops in a controlled way and at high-throughputs, enables the miniaturiz ...

EPFL2019

An Unconventional Iron Nickel Catalyst for the Oxygen Evolution Reaction

Xile Hu, Michaël Bensimon, Anne-Clémence Corminboeuf, Fang Song, Michael Markus Busch, Elitsa Petkucheva

The oxygen evolution reaction (OER) is a key process that enables the storage of renewable energies in the form of chemical fuels. Here, we describe a catalyst that exhibits turnover frequencies higher than state-of-the-art catalysts that operate in alkali ...

2019

Elastic behavior of partially saturated gas shales during unloading - reloading cycles in uniaxial compression

Lyesse Laloui, Alessio Ferrari, Alberto Minardi

Elastic properties of gas shales are of utmost importance for the exploitation of shale gas reservoirs. Static elastic properties are usually measured by performing unloading-reloading cycles in uniaxial or triaxial compressive tests. The response of gas s ...

2018

Hydro-mechanical characterization of gas shales and Opalinus Clay shale in partially saturated conditions

Alberto Minardi

An experimental study on the behaviour of shales in partially water saturated conditions is presented in this thesis. The Opalinus Clay shale and gas shales from different unconventional reservoirs have been studied. Opalinus Clay is currently considered a ...

EPFL2018

Nonlinear elastic response of partially saturated gas shales in uniaxial compression

Lyesse Laloui, Alessio Ferrari, Alberto Minardi

Elastic properties of gas shales are fundamental for the geomechanical characterization of unconventional reservoirs. Due to the presence of microcracks, a non-linear elastic behaviour with hysteresis is usually exhibited when gas shales are subjected to u ...

2018

Plastic-damage modeling of saturated quasi-brittle shales

Lyesse Laloui, Francesco Parisio

The constitutive modeling of shales is an important topic in the geomechanics community as it is often encountered in advanced applications such as nuclear waste storage, CO2 sequestration, and unconventional oil and gas exploitation. The goal of this work ...

Elsevier2017

An advanced methodology for the mix design optimization of hot mix asphalt

André-Gilles Dumont, Sara Bressi, Manfred Partl

The bitumen quantity to add to asphalt mixtures depends on the surfaces of aggregates and filler to be coated. The formulas currently available in the literature have limitations such as considering all the fillers with the same specific surface or the agg ...

Elsevier Sci Ltd2016

Testing of the hydro-mechanical behaviour of shales

Lyesse Laloui, Alessio Ferrari, Valentina Favero

Shales are among the most commonly considered geomaterials in current energy-related geomechanical investigations, as they are involved in engineering applications such as the unconventional extraction of natural gas, CO2 sequestration and nuclear waste ge ...

Taylor & Francis2016

On-line liquid quench sampling and UV–Vis spectroscopy for tar measurements in wood gasification process gases

Christian Ludwig, Rudolf Paul Wilhelm Jozef Struis

In biomass gasification processes, the formation and handling of tars are of major concern. Robust and versatile analytical tools are needed to on-line monitor tar compound concentrations in process gases from lab- to industrial scale. This study addresses ...

Elsevier2016

A new laboratory methodology for optimization of mixture design of asphalt concrete containing reclaimed asphalt pavement material

André-Gilles Dumont, Sara Bressi, Manfred Partl

The reduction of virgin bitumen added to asphalt mixtures containing Reclaimed Asphalt Pavement (RAP) is based on the typical assumption that all the aged binder function in the same way as the virgin binder. However, recent studies conducted by the author ...

Springer Verlag2016

Advanced methodology for optimization of mixture design of asphalt concrete containing reclaimed asphalt pavement material

Sara Bressi

Despite the massive use of Reclaimed Asphalt Pavement (RAP) in Hot Mix Asphalt (HMA) production, the chemo-physical phenomena that characterise the fabrication of these mixtures have not yet been completely explored. The detection and understanding of thes ...

EPFL2016

A framework for characterizing RAP clustering in asphalt concrete mixtures

André-Gilles Dumont, Michel Pittet, Sara Bressi, Manfred Partl

Recycled Asphalt Pavement (RAP) is commonly used in asphalt for road rehabilitation or new constructions. Nevertheless, some physical and chemical phenomena that occur during production, laying and compaction of mixtures containing RAP are not yet complete ...

Elsevier Sci Ltd2016

Dynamic investigation of nutrient consumption and injection strategy in microbial enhanced oil recovery (MEOR) by means of large-scale experiments

Koen Blanckaert

Microbial enhanced oil recovery (MEOR) depends on the in situ microbial activity to release trapped oil in reservoirs. In practice, undesired consumption is a universal phenomenon but cannot be observed effectively in small-scale physical simulations due t ...

Springer2015

Constitutive analysis of shale: a coupled damage plasticity approach

Lyesse Laloui, Francesco Parisio

Shales have become increasingly important because they play key roles in modern energy and environmental geomechanics applications, such as nuclear waste storage, non-conventional oil and gas operations and CO2 geological storage. Shale behaves in a quasi- ...

Elsevier2015