Despite a devoted cult following and high praise from a handful of reviewers, Donald Harington has received scant attention in the academic literature. Harington (1935-2009) published 14 novels, most of them centered around the fictional Ozark hamlet of Stay More, Arkansas. Because he wrote mostly about a single town and because his novels contain a folkloric magical realism, he has often been compared to William Faulkner and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, but his works defy easy classification. This report argues that Harington’s novel Farther Along is a recovery narrative structurally and thematically congruent with the recovery narratives told at Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. The storyteller establishes his “qualifications” as an addictive drinker and depicts alcoholism as a symptom of underlying problems manifested not only in drinking but also in self-pity and resentment. The drinker reaches a crisis, or bottom, and begins to recover after going to meetings and hearing someone else’s autobiographical story that reveals truths about the nature of addiction. Continued attendance at meetings, during which one identifies with the stories of others, ends alcoholic isolation. Help from some type of higher power becomes crucial to achieving sobriety. And recovery includes service to others as a safeguard against the return of self-pity. However, in Farther Along it is not AA’s twelve-step program that leads the protagonist to sobriety. Instead, it is storytelling in itself – fiction – that functions as the “program” of recovery. More particularly, Harington, himself an alcoholic who remained sober for more than two decades, found an alternative to AA in his bizarre brand of magical realism. Thus, the novel is a testament to the healing power of stories. / text

Compositional reservoir simulation studies were performed to investigate the effect of uncertain reservoir parameters, flood design variables, and economic factors on coupled CO₂ sequestration and EOR projects. Typical sandstone and carbonate reservoir properties were used to build generic reservoir models. A large number of simulations were needed to quantify the impact of all these factors and their corresponding uncertainties taking into account various combinations of the factors. The design of experiment method along with response surface methodology and Monte-Carlo simulations were utilized to maximize the information gained from each uncertainty analysis. The two objective functions were project profit in the form of $/bbl of oil produced and sequestered amount of CO₂ in the reservoir. The optimized values for all objective functions predicted by design of experiment and the response surface method were found to be close to the values obtained by the simulation study, but with only a small fraction of the computational time. After the statistical analysis of the simulation results, the most to least influential factors for maximizing both profit and amount of stored CO₂ are the produced gas oil ratio constraint, production and injection well types, and well spacing. For WAG injection scenarios, the Dykstra-Parsons coefficient and combinations of WAG ratio and slug size are important parameters. Also for a CO₂ flood, no significant reduction of profit occurred when only the storage of CO₂ was maximized. In terms of the economic parameters, it was demonstrated that the oil price dominates the CO₂ EOR and storage. This study showed that sandstone reservoirs have higher probability of need for CO₂i ncentives. In addition, higher CO₂ credit is needed for WAG injection scenarios than continuous CO₂ injection. As the second part of this study, scaling groups for miscible CO₂ flooding in a three-dimensional oil reservoir were derived using inspectional analysis with special emphasis on the equations related to phase behavior. Some of these scaling groups were used to develop a new MMP correlation. This correlation was compared with published correlations using a wide range of reservoir fluids and found to give more accurate predictions of the MMP. / text

Highly fractured carbonate reservoirs are a class of reservoirs characterized by high conductivity fractures surrounding low permeability matrix blocks. In these reservoirs, wettability alteration is a key method for recovering oil. Water imbibes into the matrix blocks upon water flooding if the reservoir rock is water-wet. However, many carbonate reservoirs are oil-wet. Surfactant solution was used to enhance spontaneous imbibition between the fractures and the matrix by both wettability alteration and ultra-low interfacial tensions. The first part of this study was devoted to determining the wettability of reservoir rocks using Amott-Harvey Index method, and also evaluating the performance of surfactants on wettability alteration, based on the contact angle measurement and spontaneous imbibition rate and ultimate oil recovery on oil-wet reservoir cores. The reservoir rocks have been found to be slightly oil-wet. One cationic surfactant BTC8358, one anionic surfactant and one ultra-low IFT surfactant formulation AKL-207 are all found to alter the wettability towards more water-wet and promote oil recovery through spontaneous imbibition. The second part of the study focused on the parameters that affect wettability alteration by surfactants. Some factors such as core dimension, permeability and heterogeneity of porous medium are evaluated in the spontaneous imbibition tests. Higher permeability leads to higher imbibition rate and higher ultimate oil recovery. Heterogeneity of core samples slows down the imbibition process if other properties are similar. Core dimension is critical in upscaling from laboratory conditions to field matrix blocks. The imbibition rate is slower in larger dimension of core. Further, we investigated the effects of EDTA in surfactant-mediated spontaneous imbibition. Since high concentration of cationic divalent ions in the aqueous solution markedly suppresses the surfactant-mediated wettability alteration, EDTA improved the performance of surfactant in the spontaneous imbibition tests. It is proposed in the thesis that surfactant/EDTA-enhanced imbibition may involve the dissolution mechanism. More experiments should be conducted to verify this mechanism. The benefits of using EDTA in the surfactant solution include but not limited to: altering the surface charge of carbonate to negative, producing the in-situ soap, reducing the brine hardness, decreasing the surfactant adsorption, and creating the water-wet area by dissolving the dolomite mineral. / text

The goal of this work is to change the wettability of a carbonate rock from oil wet-mixed-wet towards water-wet at high temperature and high salinity. Only simple surfactant systems (single surfactant, dual surfactants) in dilute concentration were tried for this purpose. It was thought that the change in wettability would help to recover more oil during secondary surfactant flood as compared to regular waterflood. Three types of surfactants, anionic, non-ionic and cationic surfactants in dilute concentrations (<0.2 wt%) were used. Initial surfactant screening was done on the basis of aqueous stability at these harsh conditions. Contact angle experiments on aged calcite plates were done to narrow down the list of surfactants and spontaneous imbibition experiments were conducted on field cores for promising surfactants. Secondary waterflooding was conducted in cores with and without the wettability altering surfactants. It was observed that barring a few surfactants, most were aqueous unstable by themselves at these harsh conditions. Dual surfactant systems, a mixture of a non-ionic and a cationic surfactant increased the aqueous stability of the non-ionic surfactants. One of the dual surfactant system, a mixture of Tergitol NP-10 and Dodecyl trimethyl ammonium bromide, proved very effective for wettability alteration and could recover 70-80% of OOIP during spontaneous imbibition. Secondary waterflooding with the wettability altering surfactant (without alkali or polymer) increased the oil recovery over the waterflooding without the surfactants (from 29% to 40% OOIP). Surfactant adsorption calculated during the coreflood showed an adsorption of 0.24 mg NP-10/gm of rock and 0.20 mg DTAB/gm of rock. A waterflood done after the surfactant flood revealed change in the relative permeability before and after the surfactant flood suggesting change in wettability towards water-wet. / text

In this paper, we recover the amplitude of a seismic image by approximating the normal (demigrationmigration)operator. In this approximation, we make use of the property that curvelets remain invariant under the action of the normal operator. We propose a seismic amplitude recovery method that employs an eigenvalue like decomposition for the normal operator using curvelets as eigen-vectors. Subsequently, we propose an approximate non-linear singularity-preserving solution to the least-squares seismic imaging problem with sparseness in the curvelet domain and spatial continuity constraints. Our method is tested with a reverse-time ’wave-equation’ migration code simulating the acoustic wave equation on the SEG-AA salt model.

In this paper, we recover the amplitude of a seismic image by approximating the normal (demigrationmigration) operator. In this approximation, we make use of the property that curvelets remain invariant under the action of the normal operator. We propose a seismic amplitude recovery method that employs an eigenvalue like decomposition for the normal operator using curvelets as eigen-vectors. Subsequently, we propose an approximate non-linear singularity-preserving solution to the least-squares seismic imaging problem with sparseness in the curvelet domain and spatial continuity constraints. Our method is tested with a reverse-time ’wave-equation’ migration code simulating the acoustic wave equation on the SEG-AA salt model.

The purpose of this research was to quantify what value could be gained from cutting solid wood products from old-growth western hemlock (Tsuga heterophylla (Raf.) Sarg.) logs that are used to produce pulp in British Columbia. These logs represent a significant portion of the resource and increasing their value recovery would be beneficial to the forest industry. One hundred and sixteen logs were sampled from the coastal and interior regions of British Columbia. Dimension and quality attributes were measured to enable estimates of gross and merchantable volume. Logs deemed likely to yield lumber were sawn with the aim of maximizing value recovery. The nominal dimension and grade of all lumber recovered was recorded. Margins and breakpoints at which sawing became profitable were calculated. Models to predict the volume of lumber and proportion of Clear grade lumber recovered (“C Industrial” grade at the interior mill, “D Select” grade at the coastal mill) were developed. Lumber recovery, especially Clear grade lumber, was significantly higher from logs from the coastal site. At current market prices, cutting lumber from these logs was profitable, with the highest margins achieved when chips were produced from the milling residue. It was not profitable to recover lumber from the interior logs regardless of whether chips were produced. The disparity between locations was attributed to differences between the logs, the sawmilling equipment, the sawyers’ motivations and the lumber grades. Between 60% and 67% of coastal logs and 13% to 21% of interior logs returned a profit, depending on whether chips were produced. Models were developed to better identify these logs using observable attributes. A linear model described the total volume of lumber recovered. Significant predictor variables in the model were the gross log volume, the average width of the sound collar and the stage of butt/heart rot at the large end. A second model predicted the proportion of Clear grade lumber. Regional models were developed to account for different Clear lumber grades between sawmills. Significant predictor variables were knot frequency, diameter at the large end, volume, length, taper and the width of the sound collar at the large end.

Quality defects are a common problem for producing companies, but causes and consequences are often unknown. The purpose of this thesis assignment is to develop a step-by-step analysis method for identifying the root causes of quality defects based on previously examined consequences. The first steps focus on customer recovery meanwhile the following steps concentrate on process recovery. The analysis method is process-orientated as the complete production and delivery process are scrutinized upstream by the combination of commonly used quality tools.   For testing the applicability of the presented method this thesis comprises a case study conducted at one company receiving complaints about quality defects. For the Case Study Company the consequences and causes of quality defects are described, analyzed and suggestions for improvement are developed.   In the investigated case, the developed method helps to identify causes and consequences of incomplete delivery, the company’s major quality problem. The upstream approach proved advantages for two reasons. First of all including the customer side guarantees that the cause analysis is limited to the relevant problems. With the help of the method the severity of consequences depending on the customers’ awareness of defects and available time can be detected. Secondly problems can be scrutinized in natural order as difficulties in production once identified can be followed step by step to the causes in a preceding step. The main causes identified in this case study are a lack of process definition and of standardization. Thus, the portrayed case suggests that regular appearances of quality defects are not a coincidence. The reasons are the underlying, possibly insufficiently defined and managed processes.   The general finding of the thesis assignment is the presented analysis method that comprises a systematic process-oriented approach designed to examine consequences and causes of quality defects. In contrast to the root cause analysis approaches found in literature each analysis step is described in detail. This makes the method easy to apply in practice. Therefore the method is a valid tool to deal with a high degree of complexity. The case study proved that it is effective and efficient to scrutinize problems with these characteristics. Under different circumstances the application of single quality tools might be sufficient and hence resource effective. Further investigation is necessary since this method has only been tested in one case study.

The current rate of species extinction is higher than at any other time in Earth’s history. Despite our understanding of the causes and consequences of extinction and the development of numerous species conservation plans, it is surprising how little we know about the dynamics of extinction and recovery. Here, I explore the dynamics of population extinction and recovery across a range of meio-invertebrate species embedded in aquatic multi-trophic communities under external pressure. My results indicate that external mortality frequency has a negative impact on the dynamics of population extinction and recovery and suggest that it may be possible to predict patterns of population extinction from patterns of population growth as well as patterns of recovery from patterns of population collapse. My findings provide a valuable empirical basis from which we may increase our understanding of the factors influencing extinction risk and recovery potential to develop sustainable management strategies.

Wastewater contains many valuable constituents, including phosphorus, nitrogen and more energy than what is required to treat it. This, combined with increasingly more stringent effluent requirements and the desire for water reuse, creates a demand for a system capable of both nutrient and energy recovery. The main objective was to develop a new wastewater treatment process configuration capable of maximizing energy recovery while enhancing biological phosphorus removal. Three pilot membrane bioreactors were operated at SRTs ranging from 2 days to 8 days to evaluate membrane fouling, treatment performance, sludge production and sludge settleability. The results showed high organics removal and near complete nitrification at all SRTs. Membrane fouling was highest at lower SRTs. The collected data were then used to calibrate a series of model configurations. The best configuration consisted of two sludge systems in series, with a short SRT anaerobic-aerobic first stage and an extended SRT pre-anoxic second stage. / Canadian Water Network