A method based on Electrical Capacitance Tomography (ECT) and an improved Least Squares Support Vector Machine (LS-SVM) is proposed for void fraction measurement of oil-gas two-phase flow. In the modeling stage, to solve the two problems in LS-SVM, pruning skills are employed to make LS-SVM sparse and robust; then the Real-Coded Genetic Algorithm is introduced to solve the difficult problem...

At Planck-scale, spacetime is " foamy " due to quantum fluctuations predicted by quantum gravity. Here we consider the possibility of using spacetime foam-induced phase incoherence of light from distant galaxies and gamma-ray bursters to probe Planck-scale physics. In particular, we critically examine the cumulative effects of spacetime fluctuations over a huge distance. Unfortunately , our ana...

We investigated five cases with cerebrotendinous xanthomatosis (CTX) with particular reference to biochemical and pathological pulmonary disorders. To date, few reports discuss the pathophysiology of pulmonary disorders of CTX patients. This study is the first investigation of such pulmonary disorders. All 5 patients had no pulmonary symptoms and no disturbances on radiological studies and pulm...

Herein, we report the phase inversion of ionomer-stabilized emulsions to form high internal phase emulsions (HIPEs) induced by salt concentration and pH changes. The ionomers are sulfonated polystyrenes (SPSs) with different sulfonation degrees. The emulsion types were determined by conductivity measurements, confocal microscopy and optical microscopy, and the formation of HIPE organogels was v...

We investigate the effect of different saturation histories relevant to various oil displacement processes (including secondary and tertiary gas injections) on three-phase gas/oil/brine relative permeabilities of water-wet sandstone. It is found that three-phase water (wetting phase) relative permeability is primarily a function of water saturation and shows no dependency upon saturation histor...

The research presented in this thesis is concerned with the flow behaviour of two-phase, liquid-liquid, oil-water flow through horizontal pipes. The test liquids used were oil (density 828kg/rn 3, viscosity 6x iO 3 Pa s) and water, with experiments carried out in a purpose built test facility with a stainless steel pipe (internal dia. 38mm, length 8m). Visual observation of the flow was possibl...

Mangrove sediment harbors a unique microbiome and is a hospitable environment for a diverse group of bacteria capable of oil biodegradation. Our goal was to understand bacterial community dynamics from mangrove sediments contaminated with heavy-oil and to evaluate patterns potentially associated with oil biodegradation is such environments. We tested the previously proposed hypothesis of a two-...

All foamy viruses give rise to a strong nuclear staining when infected cells are reacted with sera from infected hosts. This nuclear fluorescence distinguishes foamy viruses from all other retroviruses. The experiments reported here indicate that the foamy virus Gag precursor protein is transiently located in the nuclei of infected cells and this is the likely reason for the typical foamy virus...