Engineering Commons^™

An Improved Foam Modeling Technique And Its Application To Petroleum Drilling And Production Practice, Yanfang Wang

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Foam is one of the most common used multiphase fluid in Underbalanced Drilling (UBD) and Managed Pressure Drilling (MPD). Because of its low density, high capacity of lifting and carrying cuttings, low cost and compatibility with formations, foam has become more superior than the conventional drilling mud when depleted reservoir pressure, severe lost circulation, or unstable borehole are encountered. In general, the success of foam applications rely on the understanding of the fundamentals of foam rheology in downhole conditions.

Foam rheology has been studied for decades. Conventional foam rheological models such as Power Law, Bingham Plastic, Herschel-Bulkley to explain foam …

Adsorption And Reconfiguration Of Amphiphiles At Silica-Water Interfaces: Role Of Electrostatic Interactions, Van Der Waals Forces And Hydrogen Bonds, Yao Wu

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The ability to explore and predict metastable structures of hybrid self-assemblies is of central importance for the next generation of advanced materials with novel properties. As compared to their thermodynamically stable forms, the kinetically stabilized materials show improved functionality potentially over their stable counterparts. The self-assembly processes usually originate from weak intermolecular interactions, involving a dynamic competition between attractive and repulsive interactions. These weak forces, including van der Waals (vdW), electrostatic interaction and the hydrogen bonding (H-bonding), can be tuned by external stimuli, e.g., confinement, temperature and ionization, and consequently driving hybrid materials into different configurations. It is challenging to …

Centrifugal Microfluidic Platform For Solid-Phase-Extraction (Spe) And Fluorescence Detection Applications, Yong Zhang

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Solid phase extraction (SPE) is a widely used method to separate and concentrate the target molecules in liquid mixture. Traditional SPE has to be conducted in the laboratory with professional equipment and skilled operators. The microfluidic and 3D printing technology have opened up the opportunity in developing miniaturized automatic instruments. The main contribution of this research is to integrate the SPE process on a novel centrifugal platform. Various valves are applied on the platform to help control the aqueous sample and reagents in the cartridge.

First, a centrifugal microfluidic platform was built for automatically detecting trace oil pollution in water. …