scholarly journals Cryoegg: development and field trials of a wireless subglacial probe for deep, fast-moving ice

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Michael R. Prior-Jones ◽  
Elizabeth A. Bagshaw ◽  
Jonathan Lees ◽  
Lindsay Clare ◽  
Stephen Burrow ◽  
...  

Abstract Subglacial hydrological systems require innovative technological solutions to access and observe. Wireless sensor platforms can be used to collect and return data, but their performance in deep and fast-moving ice requires quantification. We report experimental results from Cryoegg: a spherical probe that can be deployed into a borehole or moulin and transit through the subglacial hydrological system. The probe measures temperature, pressure and electrical conductivity in situ and returns all data wirelessly via a radio link. We demonstrate Cryoegg's utility in studying englacial channels and moulins, including in situ salt dilution gauging. Cryoegg uses VHF radio to transmit data to a surface receiving array. We demonstrate transmission through up to 1.3 km of cold ice – a significant improvement on the previous design. The wireless transmission uses Wireless M-Bus on 169 MHz; we present a simple radio link budget model for its performance in cold ice and experimentally confirm its validity. Cryoegg has also been tested successfully in temperate ice. The battery capacity should allow measurements to be made every 2 h for more than a year. Future iterations of the radio system will enable Cryoegg to transmit data through up to 2.5 km of ice.

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Prior-Jones ◽  
Elizabeth Bagshaw ◽  
Jonathan Lees ◽  
Lindsay Clare ◽  
Stephen Burrow ◽  
...  

<p>Innovative technological solutions are required to access and observe subglacial hydrological systems beneath glaciers and ice sheets. Wireless sensing systems can be used to collect and return data without the risk of losing data from cable breakage, which is a major obstacle when studying fast flowing glaciers and other high-strain environments. However, the performance of wireless sensors in deep and fast-moving ice has yet to be evaluated formally. We report experimental results from Cryoegg: a spherical probe that can be deployed along an ice borehole and either remain fixed in place or potentially travel through the subglacial hydrological system. The probe makes measurements in-situ and sends them back to the surface via a wireless link. Cryoegg uses very high frequency (VHF) radio to transmit data through up to 1.3 km of cold ice to a surface receiving array. It measures temperature, pressure and electrical conductivity, returning all data in real time. This transmission uses Wireless M-Bus on 169 MHz; we present a simple “radio link budget” model for its performance in cold ice and confirm its validity experimentally. Power is supplied by an internal battery with sufficient capacity for two measurements per day for up to a year, although higher reporting rates are available at the expense of battery life. Field trials were conducted in 2019 at two locations in Greenland (the EastGRIP borehole and the RESPONDER project site on Sermeq Kujalleq/Store Glacier) and on the Rhone Glacier in Switzerland.  Our results from the field demonstrate Cryoegg’s utility in studying englacial channels and moulins, including estimating moulin discharge through salt dilution gauging with the instrument deployed deep within the moulin. Future iterations of the radio system will allow Cryoegg to transmit through up to 2.5 km of ice.</p>


2012 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 1033-1040 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. Barlett ◽  
K. Zhuang ◽  
R. Mahadevan ◽  
D. Lovley

Abstract. Enhancing microbial U(VI) reduction with the addition of organic electron donors is a promising strategy for immobilizing uranium in contaminated groundwaters, but has yet to be optimized because of a poor understanding of the factors controlling the growth of various microbial communities during bioremediation. In previous field trials in which acetate was added to the subsurface, there were two distinct phases: an initial phase in which acetate-oxidizing, U(VI)-reducing Geobacter predominated and U(VI) was effectively reduced and a second phase in which acetate-oxidizing sulfate reducing bacteria (SRB) predominated and U(VI) reduction was poor. The interaction of Geobacter and SRB was investigated both in sediment incubations that mimicked in situ bioremediation and with in silico metabolic modeling. In sediment incubations, Geobacter grew quickly but then declined in numbers as the microbially reducible Fe(III) was depleted whereas the SRB grow more slowly and reached dominance after 30–40 days. Modeling predicted a similar outcome. Additional modeling in which the relative initial percentages of the Geobacter and SRB were varied indicated that there was little to no competitive interaction between Geobacter and SRB when acetate was abundant. Further simulations suggested that the addition of Fe(III) would revive the Geobacter, but have little to no effect on the SRB. This result was confirmed experimentally. The results demonstrate that it is possible to predict the impact of amendments on important components of the subsurface microbial community during groundwater bioremediation. The finding that Fe(III) availability, rather than competition with SRB, is the key factor limiting the activity of Geobacter during in situ uranium bioremediation will aid in the design of improved uranium bioremediation strategies.


Author(s):  
Robert R. Richardson ◽  
Christoph R. Birkl ◽  
Michael A. Osborne ◽  
David A. Howey

Accurate on-board capacity estimation is of critical importance in lithium-ion battery applications. Battery charging/discharging often occurs under a constant current load, and hence voltage vs. time measurements under this condition may be accessible in practice. This paper presents a novel diagnostic technique, Gaussian Process regression for In-situ Capacity Estimation (GP-ICE), which is capable of estimating the battery capacity using voltage vs. time measurements over short periods of galvanostatic operation. The approach uses Gaussian process regression to map from voltage values at a selection of uniformly distributed times, to cell capacity. Unlike previous works, GP-ICE does not rely on interpreting the voltage-time data through the lens of Incremental Capacity (IC) or Differential Voltage (DV) analysis. This overcomes both the need to differentiate the voltage-time data (a process which amplifies measurement noise), and the requirement that the range of voltage measurements encompasses the peaks in the IC/DV curves. Rather, GP-ICE gives insight into which portions of the voltage range are most informative about the capacity for a particular cell. We apply GP-ICE to a dataset of 8 cells, which were aged by repeated application of an ARTEMIS urban drive cycle. Within certain voltage ranges, as little as 10 seconds of charge data is sufficient to enable capacity estimates with ∼ 2% RMSE.


Author(s):  
Adekunle Titus Adediji ◽  
Joseph Babatunde Dada ◽  
Moses Oludare Ajewole

In this study, four years in-situ measurements of atmospheric parameters (pressure, temperature and relative humidity) were carried out. The measurement was by placing an automatic weather station at five different heights: ground surface, 50, 100, 150 and 200 m respectively on a 220 m Nigeria Television Authority TV tower in Akure, South Western Nigeria. The four years Data collected (January 2007 to December 2009 and January to December 2011) were used to compute radio refractivity and its gradient. The local effect of a location/ region cannot but looked into when designing effective radio link, hence the diurnal, seasonal and annual variations of the radio refractivity gradient were studied. Results showed that refractivity gradient steadily increases inthe hour of 8:30 and 9:30 to 18:00 during dry season throughout the years investigated, and decreases two hours in the rainy season than the dry season. The record shows that at 50 m altitude, the maximum and minimum values are 158 N-unit/km around 14:30 and - 286 N-unit/km around 13:30 to 14:00 hrs, LT during the dry and rainy season respectively. Seasonally, refractivity gradient is steeper with greater variability in the dry season months than in the wet season months.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Prior-Jones ◽  
Elizabeth Bagshaw ◽  
Jonathan Lees ◽  
Lindsay Clare ◽  
Stephen Burrow ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  

SPE Journal ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 23 (03) ◽  
pp. 803-818 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mehrnoosh Moradi Bidhendi ◽  
Griselda Garcia-Olvera ◽  
Brendon Morin ◽  
John S. Oakey ◽  
Vladimir Alvarado

Summary Injection of water with a designed chemistry has been proposed as a novel enhanced-oil-recovery (EOR) method, commonly referred to as low-salinity (LS) or smart waterflooding, among other labels. The multiple names encompass a family of EOR methods that rely on modifying injection-water chemistry to increase oil recovery. Despite successful laboratory experiments and field trials, underlying EOR mechanisms remain controversial and poorly understood. At present, the vast majority of the proposed mechanisms rely on rock/fluid interactions. In this work, we propose an alternative fluid/fluid interaction mechanism (i.e., an increase in crude-oil/water interfacial viscoelasticity upon injection of designed brine as a suppressor of oil trapping by snap-off). A crude oil from Wyoming was selected for its known interfacial responsiveness to water chemistry. Brines were prepared with analytic-grade salts to test the effect of specific anions and cations. The brines’ ionic strengths were modified by dilution with deionized water to the desired salinity. A battery of experiments was performed to show a link between dynamic interfacial viscoelasticity and recovery. Experiments include double-wall ring interfacial rheometry, direct visualization on microfluidic devices, and coreflooding experiments in Berea sandstone cores. Interfacial rheological results show that interfacial viscoelasticity generally increases as brine salinity is decreased, regardless of which cations and anions are present in brine. However, the rate of elasticity buildup and the plateau value depend on specific ions available in solution. Snap-off analysis in a microfluidic device, consisting of a flow-focusing geometry, demonstrates that increased viscoelasticity suppresses interfacial pinch-off, and sustains a more continuous oil phase. This effect was examined in coreflooding experiments with sodium sulfate brines. Corefloods were designed to limit wettability alteration by maintaining a low temperature (25°C) and short aging times. Geochemical analysis provided information on in-situ water chemistry. Oil-recovery and pressure responses were shown to directly correlate with interfacial elasticity [i.e., recovery factor (RF) is consistently greater the larger the induced interfacial viscoelasticity for the system examined in this paper]. Our results demonstrate that a largely overlooked interfacial effect of engineered waterflooding can serve as an alternative and more complete explanation of LS or engineered waterflooding recovery. This new mechanism offers a direction to design water chemistry for optimized waterflooding recovery in engineered water-chemistry processes, and opens a new route to design EOR methods.


2013 ◽  
Vol 53 (1) ◽  
pp. 273
Author(s):  
Quentin Morgan ◽  
John Pope ◽  
Peter Ramsay

A new core-less testing capability has been developed to provide concurrent measurements of coal seam flow capacity and gas content at in-situ conditions. The fluid-based measurement principles are intended to overcome time constraints, accuracy limitations, and cost implications of discrete measurements attributed to traditional ex-situ measurements on core samples. Details of measurement principles, associated enabling technologies, and generic test procedures have been disclosed in a previous publication. In 2012 a number of field trials were conducted with this new service for both coal mine operators and CSG operators. This peer-reviewed paper will detail pre-job planning, well site execution, and data analysis for one of these trials, which involved testing several seams across two wells, and will illustrate comparison with data acquired using conventional testing techniques from offset wells. This peer-reviewed paper will also highlight key learnings and overall performance, and explain how the learned lessons can be applied to improve testing efficacy and data quality.


2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (10) ◽  
pp. 2676-2690 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alejandro García-Miranda Ferrari ◽  
Paul Carrington ◽  
Samuel J. Rowley-Neale ◽  
Craig E. Banks

This Review explores the parameters to be engineered to design in situ electrochemical sensor platforms capable of meeting new EU regulation.


2010 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 583-600 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. Alkama ◽  
B. Decharme ◽  
H. Douville ◽  
M. Becker ◽  
A. Cazenave ◽  
...  

Abstract In earth system models, the partitioning of precipitation among the variations of continental water storage, evapotranspiration, and freshwater runoff to the ocean has a major influence on the terrestrial water and energy budgets and thereby on simulated climate on a wide range of scales. The evaluation of continental hydrology is therefore a crucial task that requires offline simulations driven by realistic atmospheric forcing to avoid the systematic biases commonly found in global atmospheric models. Generally, this evaluation is done mainly by comparison with in situ river discharge data, which does not guarantee that the spatiotemporal distribution of water storage and evapotranspiration is correctly simulated. In this context, the Interactions between Soil, Biosphere, and Atmosphere–Total Runoff Integrating Pathways (ISBA-TRIP) continental hydrological system of the Centre National de Recherches Météorologiques is evaluated by using the additional constraint of terrestrial water storage (TWS) variations derived from three independent gravity field retrievals (datasets) from the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE). On the one hand, the results show that, in general, ISBA-TRIP captures the seasonal and the interannual variability in both TWS and discharges. GRACE provides an additional constraint on the simulated hydrology and consolidates the former evaluation only based on river discharge observations. On the other hand, results indicate that river storage variations represent a significant contribution to GRACE measurements. While this remark highlights the need to improve the TRIP river routing model for a more useful comparison with GRACE [Decharme et al. (Part II of the present study)], it also suggests that low-resolution gravimetry products do not necessarily represent a strong additional constraint for model evaluation, especially in downstream areas of large river basins where long-term discharge data are available.


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