Quantitative Analysis and Efficiency Assessment of Floodwater Harvesting System in Arid Region: Case of Touzouz ephemeral stream—Mzab Valley

Water Resources - The Mzab Valley is characterized by an arid climate with limited amounts of rainfall. In the context of water scarcity, the Mzab water management system recovers floodwater for...     

Delineation of groundwater potential zones using remote sensing and GIS-based data-driven models

The rapid increase in human population has increased the groundwater resources demand for drinking, agricultural and industrial purposes. The main purpose of this study is to produce groundwater potential map (GPM) using weights-of-evidence (WOE) and evidential belief function (EBF) models based on geographic information system in the Azna Plain, Lorestan Province, Iran. A total number of 370 groundwater wells with discharge more than 10 m³s^?1were considered and out of them, 256 (70%) were randomly selected for training purpose, while the remaining114 (30%) were used for validating the model. In next step, the effective factors on the groundwater potential such as altitude, slope aspect, slope angle, curvature, distance from rivers, drainage density, topographic wetness index, fault distance, fault density, lithology and land use were derived from the spatial geodatabases. Subsequently, the GPM was produced using WOE and EBF models. Finally, the validation of the GPMs was carried out using areas under the ROC curve (AUC). Results showed that the GPM prepared using WOE model has the success rate of 73.62%. Similarly, the AUC plot showed 76.21% prediction accuracy for the EBF model which means both the models performed fairly good predication accuracy. The GPMs are useful sources for planners and engineers in water resource management, land use planning and hazard mitigation purpose.     

Effect of salinity on chlorophyll concentration, leaf area, yield and yield components of rice genotypes grown under saline environment

Salt tolerance in eighteen advanced rice genotypes was studied under an artificially salinized (EC=8.5 dSm^?1) soil conditions after 90 days of transplanting. The results showed that the yield per plant, chlorophyll concentrations, fertility percentage, and number of productive tillers, panicle length and number of primary braches per panicle of all the genotypes were reduced by salinity. However, genotypes viz. Jhona-349 x Basmati-370, NR-1, DM-59418, DM-63275, DM-64198 and DM-38-88 showed better salinity tolerance than others.     

Investigating the Economic Performance of Tunnel Excavation in Iran: 1998–2013

Nowadays, the world is witnessing the ever increasing need of Tunnel excavation due to their unique features and the kind of human applied plans. This has led to increase in demand of excavating this engineering factor. Tunnel excavation process faces a lot of challenges due to environmental and technological complexities which causes the economic evaluation and investigation of this project to be difficult. It is tried to develop the proposed model with regard to efficiency concept in order to evaluate and investigate the efficiency of relative economic performance of Tunnel excavation projects and turn to its modeling and implementing by data envelopment analysis and Fuzzy DEMATEL techniques. The results in Iran showed that the proposed model can turn to investigation and evaluation of economic efficiency of Tunnel excavation by considering two optimistic (ideal) and pessimistic perspectives such that the Tunnel excavation process of “Karaj water transition” and “Cheshmelangan water transition” among 12 rock Tunnel excavation projects of Iran in the time period of 1998–2013 were respectively introduced as the most efficient and the most inefficient rock Tunnel excavation projects.     

Seismicity constraints on stress regimes along Sinai subplate boundaries

The relative movement between African, Arabian and Eurasian plates has significantly controlled the tectonic process of Sinai subplate region, although its kinematics and precise boundaries are still doubtful. The respective subplate bounded on both sides by the Aqaba-Dead Sea transform fault to the east and the Gulf of Suez, the only defined part, to the west. Seismicity parameters, moment magnitude relation and fault plane solutions were combined to determine the active tectonics along the aforementioned boundaries. Seven shallow seismogenic zones were defined by the heterogeneity in stress field orientations. Along the eastern boundary, the average fault plane solution obtained from the moment tensor summation (MTS) reveals a sinistral strike-slip faulting mechanism. The corresponding seismic strain rate tensor showed that the present tectonic stress producing earthquakes along the boundary is dominated by both NW-SE compression and NE-SW dilatation. Towards the north, the average focal mechanism showed a normal faulting mechanism of N185°E compression and an N94°E extension in the Carmel Fairi seismic zone. On the other hand, the active crustal deformation along the western boundary (Gulf of Suez region) showed a prevailing tensional stress regime of NE to ENE orientations; producing an average fault plane solution of normal faulting mechanism. The seismic strain rate tensor reveals a dominant stress regime of N58°E extension and N145°E compression in consistence with the general tectonic nature in northeastern Africa. Finally, the extensional to strike-slip stress regimes obtained in the present study emphasize that the deformation accommodated along the Sinai subplate boundaries are in consistence with the kinematics models along the plate boundaries representing the northern extremity part of the Red Sea region.     

Numerical solution and convergence analysis of steam injection in heavy oil reservoirs

In this paper, the numerical methods for solving the problem of steam injection in the heavy oil reservoirs are presented. We consider a 3-dimensional model of 3-phase flow, oil, water, and steam, with the effect of 3-phase relative permeability. Interphase mass transfer of water and steam is considered; oil is assumed nonvolatile. We apply the simultaneous solution approach to solve the corresponding nonlinear discretized partial differential equation in the fully implicit form. The convergence of finite difference scheme is proved by the Rosinger theorem. The heuristic Jacobian-Free-Newton-Krylov (HJFNK) method is proposed for solving the system of algebraic equations. The result of this proposed numerical method is well compared with some experimental results. Our numerical results show that the first iteration of the full approximation scheme (FAS) provides a good initial guess for the Newton method. Therefore, we propose a new hybrid-FAS-HJFNK method while there is no steam in the reservoir. The numerical results show that the hybrid-FAS-HJFNK method converges faster than the HJFNK method.