• Geomechanics and Engineering
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• v.13 no.2
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• pp.285-300
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• 2017

Shallow coal resources are increasingly depleted, the mining has entered the deep stage. Due to "High stress, high gas, strong adsorption and low permeability" of coal seam, the gas drainage has become more difficult and the probability of coal and gas outburst accident increases. Based on the flow solid coupling theory of coal seam gas, the coupling model about stress and gas seepage of coal seam was set up by solid module and Darcy module in Comsol Multiphysics. The gas extraction effects were researched after applying hydraulic technology to increase permeability. The results showed that the effective influence radius increases with the expanded borehole radius and drainage time, decreases with initial gas pressure. The relationship between the effective influence radius and various factors presents in the form: $y=a+{\frac{b}{\left(1+{(\frac{x}{x_0})^p}\right)}}$. The effective influence radius with multiple boreholes is obviously larger than that of the single hole. According to the actual coal seam and gas geological conditions, appropriate layout way was selected to achieve the best effect. The field application results are consistent with the simulation results. It is found that the horizontal stress plays a very important role in coal seam drainage effect. The stress distribution change around the drilling hole will lead to the changes in porosity of coal seam, further resulting in permeability evolution and finally gas pressure distribution varies.

• Geomechanics and Engineering
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• v.27 no.6
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• pp.583-594
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• 2021

The gas permeability behavior of unsaturated bentonite-based materials is of major importance for ensuring effective sealing of high-level radwaste repositories. This study investigated this by taking a sample of Granular Bentonite Material (GBM) at the end of the Engineered Barrier Emplacement (EB) experiment in the Opalinus Clay, placing it under different humidity conditions until it achieved equilibration, and testing the change in the gas permeability under loading and unloading. Environmental humidity is shown to have a significant effect on the water content, saturation, porosity and dry density of GBM and to affect its gas permeability. Higher sensitivity to confining pressure is exhibited by samples equilibrated at higher relative humidity (RH). It should be noted that for the sample at RH=98%, when the confining pressure is raised from 1 MPa to 6 MPa, gas permeability can be reduced from 10^-16 m² to 10^-19 m², which is close to the requirements of gas tightness. Due to higher water content and easier compressibility, samples equilibrated under higher RH show greater irreversibility during the loading and unloading process. The effective gas permeability of highly saturated samples can be increased by 2-3 orders of magnitude after 105℃ drying. In addition, cracks possibly occurred during the dehydration and drying process will become the main channel for gas migration, which will greatly affect the sealing performance of GBM.

• KSCE Journal of Civil and Environmental Engineering Research
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• v.36 no.2
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• pp.207-217
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• 2016

Permeability can not be expressed as a function of porosity alone, it depends on the porosity, pore size and distribution, and tortuosity of pore channels in concrete. There has been considerable interest in the relationship between microstructure and transport in cementitious materials, however, it is very rare to deal with the theoretical study on gas permeability coefficient in connection with carbonation of concrete and the effect of volumetric fraction of cement paste or aggregate on the permeability coefficient. The majority of these researches have not dealt with this issue combined with carbonation of concrete, although carbonation can significantly impact on the permeability coefficient of concrete. In this study, fundamental approach to compute gas permeability of (non)carbonated concrete is suggested. For several compositions of cement pastes, the gas permeability coefficient was calculated with the analytical formulation, followed by a microstructure-based model. For carbonated concrete, reduced porosity was calculated and this was used for calculating the gas permeability coefficeint. As the result of calculation of gas permeability for carbonated concrete, carbonation leaded to the significant reduction of gas permeability coefficient and this was obvious for concrete with high w/c ratio. Meanwhile, the relationship between gas permeability and water permeability has a linear function for cement paste based on Klinkenberg effect, however, which is not effective for concrete. For the evidence of the modeling, YOON's test was accomplished and these results were compared to each other.

• Proceedings of the Membrane Society of Korea Conference
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• 1997.10a
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• pp.69-70
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• 1997

Polyimides and related polymers, when synthesized from aromatic monomers, have generally rigid chain structures resulting in a low gas permeability. The rigidity of polymer chains reduces the segmental motion of chains and works as a good barrier against gas transport. To overcome the limit of use as materials of gas separation membranes due to low gas permeability, block copolymers with the incorporation of flexible segments like siloxane linkage and ether linkage have been studied. These block copolymers have microphase-separated structures composed of microdomains of flexible poly(dimethylsiloxane) or polyether segments and of rigid polyimides segments. In case of rigid-flexible block copolymers, the characteristics of both phases for gas permeation are of great difference. The permeation of gas molecules occurs favorably through microdomains of flexible segments, whereas those of rigid segments hinder the permeation of gas molecules. Accordingly the increase of content of flexible segments in a rigid polymer matrix will increase the gas permeability of the membrane linearly. However, this prediction does not satisfy enough many experimental results and in particular the drastic increase of the permeability is observed in a certain volume fraction. It was proposed that the gas transport mechanism is dominated by diffusion rather than gas solubility in a certain content of flexible phase if solution-diffusion mechanism is adopted. However, the transition from solubility-dependent to diffusion-dependent cannot be explained by the understanding of mechanism itself. Therefore, we consider an effective chemical path which permeable phase can form in a microheterogenous medium, and percolation concept is introduced to describe the permeability transition at near threshold where for the first time a percolation path occurs. The volume fraction of both phases is defined as V$_{\alpha}$ and V$_{\beta}$ in block copolymers, and the volume of $\beta$ phase in the threshold forming geometrically a traversing channel is defined as V$_{\betac}$. The formation mechanism of shortest chemical channel is schematically depicted in Fig. 1.

• Journal of Soil and Groundwater Environment
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• v.12 no.5
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• pp.9-18
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• 2007

Soil vapor extraction (SVE) is an effective and cost efficient method of removing volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and petroleum hydrocarbons from unsaturated soils. However, soil vapor extraction becomes ineffective in soils with low gas permeability, for example soils with air permeabilities less than 1 Darcy. Incorporating PVDs in an SVE system can extend the effectiveness of SVE to lower permeability soils by shortening the air flow-paths and ultimately expediting contaminant removal. The objective of the research described herein was to effectively incorporate PVDs into a SVE remediation system. The test results show that the gas permeability was evaluated for four different equivalent diameters, increasing the equivalent diameter results in a decrease in the calculated gas permeability. It was found that the porosity for the dry condition was greater than that of the wet condition and will allow flow rate for the same vacuum flow, offering a low resistance to the air flow.

• Proceedings of the Korean Geotechical Society Conference
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• 2005.10a
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• pp.382-388
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• 2005

Soil vapor extraction(SVE) is an effective and cost efficient method of removing volatile organic compounds(VOCs) and petroleum hydrocarbons from unsaturated soils. However, soil vapor extraction becomes ineffective in soils with low gas permeability, for example soils with air permeabilities less than 1 Darcy. Prefabricated vertical drains(PVDs) have been used for dewatering fine-grained soils for more than 25 years. Incorporating PVDs in and SVE system can extend the effectiveness of SVE to lower permeability soils by shortening the air flow-paths and ultimately expediting contaminant removal. The objective of the work described herein was to effectively incorporate PVDs into a SVE remediation system and to demonstrate a PVDs enhanced SVE system at full scale. The finding from this research will facilitate the design of field PVD-SVE systems in terms by providing insight into the optimal spacing between PVDs, the radius of influence of the wells and the flow rates to be used to capture and extract gas phase contaminants.

• Journal of Korean Society of Environmental Engineers
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• v.22 no.7
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• pp.1233-1241
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• 2000

The purpose of this study is to see the remediability and pilot system operating condition on diesel contaminated areas. Air permeability(k) and trend of gas phase ($O_2/CO_2/VOCs$) concentration to determine the remediation rate of the contaminated sites are very important. So we tested air permeability and trend of gas phase concentration. Throughout soil vapor extraction(SVE) and bioventing hybrid pilot test on different conditions, the range of air permeability(k) was 1985~1194 darcy. The tests result in soil vapor extraction and bioventing hybrid system was appropriate on this test sites, and the suitable injection air flow rate was $3.5m^3/hr$.

• Proceedings of the KSME Conference
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• 2008.11b
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• pp.3114-3119
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• 2008

Relatively high convective flow exists in the under-rib regions of a gas diffusion layer (GDL) when serpentine flow fields are employed in a PEMFC. This under-rib convection is believed to be favorable for the performance of PEMFCs, by enabling more effective use of catalysts in the under-rib regions. From the fact that the under-rib convection in a GDL is directly proportional to the permeability of the GDL, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations were performed to discover the relationship between the GDL permeability and the PEMFC performance. Single-, triple-, and quintuple-path parallel serpentine flow fields for $9\;cm^2$ active cell area were considered while changing the GDL permeability from $1{\times}10^{-12}$ to $5{\times}10^{-11}m^2$. The results showed that higher GDL permeability generally resulted in better performance of PEMFCs, but the degree of performance enhancement became smaller as the parallel path number increased. The effects of the permeability on the local variables were also discussed.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Gas
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• v.27 no.2
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• pp.39-48
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• 2023

This study presents the experimental results to measure the adsorption amount of methane gas by coal according to the conditions of a coalbed methane (CBM) reservoir. Adsorbed gas to coal seam particles was measured under reservoir conditions (normal pressure ~ 1,200 psi pressure range, temperature range15 ~ 45℃) using coal samples obtained from random mines in Kalimantan Island, North Indonesia. The obtained amount of absolute adsorbed gas was applied to triangular with linear interpolation to calculate the maximum amount of adsorbed gas according to temperature and pressure change, at which no experiment was performed. As a result, it was revealed that the amount of adsorbed gas to coal particles increased as the pressure increased and temperature decreased, but the increase of the amount of adsorbed gas decreased at more than an appropriate depth(1,000 ft). In the cleat permeability and cleat porosity for each depth of the coal bed considering the effective stress, the cleat permeability was 28.86 ~ 46.81 md, and the cleat porosity was 0.83 ~ 0.98%. This means that the gas productivity varies significantly with the depth because the reduction of the permeability according to the depth in the coal seam is significant. Therefore, a coalbed depth should be considered essential when designing the spacing of production wells in a coalbed methane reservoir in further study.

• The Journal of Engineering Geology
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• v.29 no.4
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• pp.367-381
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• 2019

We investigate pore pressure conditions and reservoir compaction associated with oil and gas production using 3 different permeability models, which are all based on one-dimensional radial flow diffusion model, but differ in considering permeability evolution during production. Model 1 assumes the most simplistic constant and invariable permeability regardless of production; Model 2 considers permeability reduction associated with reservoir compaction only due to pore pressure drawdown during production; Model 3 also considers permeability reduction but due to the effects of both pore pressure drawdown and coupled pore pressure-stress process. We first derive a unified stress-permeability relation that can be used for various sandstones. We then apply this equation to calculate pore pressure and permeability changes in the reservoir due to fluid extraction using the three permeability models. All the three models yield pore pressure profiles in the form of pressure funnel with different amounts of drawdown. Model 1, assuming constant permeability, obviously predicts the least amount of drawdown with pore pressure condition highest among the three models investigated. Model 2 estimates the largest amount of drawdown and lowest pore pressure condition. Model 3 shows slightly higher pore pressure condition than Model 2 because stress-pore pressure coupling process reduces the effective stress increase due to pore pressure depletion. We compare field data of production rate with the results of the three models. While models 1 and 2 respectively overestimates and underestimates the production rate, Model 3 estimates the field data fairly well. Our result affirms that coupling process between stress and pore pressure occurs during production, and that it is important to incorporate the coupling process in the permeability modeling, especially for tight reservoir having low permeability.