Explore the vast range of titles available.

Direct pore scale simulations of two-fluid flow on digital rock images provide a promising tool to understand the role of surface wetting phenomena on flow and transport in geologic reservoirs. We present computational protocols that mimic conventional special core analysis laboratory (SCAL) experiments, which are implemented within the open source LBPM software package. Protocols are described to simulate unsteady displacement, steady-state flow at fixed saturation, and to mimic centrifuge experiments. These methods can be used to infer relative permeability and capillary curves, and otherwise understand two-fluid flow behavior based on first principles. Morphological tools are applied to assess image resolution, establish initial conditions, and instantiate surface wetting maps based on the distribution of fluids. Internal analysis tools are described that measure essential aspects of two-fluid flow, including fluid connectivity and surface measures, which are used to track transient aspects of the flow behavior as they occur during simulation. Computationally efficient workflows are developed by combining these components with a two-fluid lattice Boltzmann model to define hybrid methods that can accelerate computations by using morphological tools to incrementally evolve the pore-scale fluid distribution. We show that the described methods can be applied to recover expected trends due to the surface wetting properties based on flow simulation in Benntheimer sandstone.

This paper introduces the Yet Another Kernel Launcher (YAKL) C++ portability library, which strives to enable user-level code with the look and feel of Fortran code. The intended audience includes both C++ developers and Fortran developers unfamiliar with C++. The C++ portability approach is briefly explained, YAKL’s main features are described, and code examples are given that demonstrate YAKL’s usage. YAKL fills a niche capability important particularly to scientific applications seeking to port Fortran code quickly to a portable C++ library. YAKL places heavy emphasis on simplicity, readability, and productivity with performance mainly emphasizing Graphics Processing Units (GPUs). Central to YAKL’s ability to allow Fortran-like user-level code are three features: (1) a multi-dimensional Array class that allows Fortran behavior; (2) a limited library of Fortran intrinsic functions; and (3) an efficient pool allocator that transparently enables cheap frequent allocations and deallocations of YAKL Arrays. While YAKL allows Fortran-style code, it also allows Arrays that exhibit C-like behavior as well, including row-major index ordering and lower bounds of “0”. YAKL currently supports CPUs, CPU threading, and Nvidia, AMD, and Intel GPUs.

The movements of fluid–fluid interfaces and the common curve are an important aspect of two-fluid-phase flow through porous media. The focus of this work is to develop, apply and evaluate methods to simulate two-fluid-phase flow in porous medium systems at the microscale and to demonstrate how these results can be used to support evolving macroscale models. Of particular concern is the problem of spurious velocities that confound the accurate representation of interfacial dynamics in such systems. To circumvent this problem, a combined level-set and lattice-Boltzmann method is advanced to simulate and track the dynamics of the fluid–fluid interface and of the common curve during simulations of two-fluid-phase flow in porous media. We demonstrate that the interface and common curve velocities can be determined accurately, even when spurious currents are generated in the vicinity of interfaces. Static and dynamic contact angles are computed and shown to agree with existing slip models. A resolution study is presented for dynamic drainage and imbibition in a sphere pack, demonstrating the sensitivity of averaged quantities to resolution.

We have demonstrated the efficient generation of sub-9-nm-wavelength picosecond laser pulses of microjoule energy at 1-Hz repetition rate with a tabletop laser. Gain-saturated lasing was obtained at λ=8.85nm in nickel-like lanthanum ions excited by collisional electron-impact excitation in a precreated plasma column heated by a picosecond optical laser pulse of 4-J energy. Furthermore, isoelectronic scaling along the lanthanide series resulted in lasing at wavelengths as short as λ=7.36nm . Simulations show that the collisionally broadened atomic transitions in these dense plasmas can support the amplification of subpicosecond soft-x-ray laser pulses.

Seeding soft X-ray plasma ampli ers with high harmonics has been demonstrated to generate high-brightness soft X-ray laser pulses with full spatial and temporal coherence. The interaction between the injected coherent eld and the swept-gain medium has been modelled. However, no exper- iment has been conducted to probe the gain dynamics when perturbed by a strong external seed eld. Here, we report the rst X-ray pump X-ray probe measurement of the nonlinear response of a plasma ampli er perturbed by a strong soft X-ray ultra-short pulse. We injected a sequence of two time-delayed high-harmonic pulses (l518.9 nm) into a collisionally excited nickel-like molybdenum plasma to measure with femto-second resolution the gain depletion induced by the saturated ampli cation of the high-harmonic pump and its subsequent recovery. The measured fast gain recovery in 1.5 1.75 ps con rms the possibility to generate ultra-intense, fully phase-coherent soft X-ray lasers by chirped pulse ampli cation in plasma ampli ers.

This dissertation describes the development of computer models to simulate laser created plasmas used to generate soft x-ray lasers. These compact short wavelength lasers have substantial average powers and very high peak brightness, that make them of significant interest for many applications. A better understanding of the plasmas is necessary to advance the development of these lasers into more compact, efficient, and higher power sources of coherent soft x-ray light. The plasma phenomena involved are complex, and require a detailed computer model of the coupled magneto-hydrodynamic and atomic physics processes to simulate their behavior. The computer models developed as part of this work consist of hydrodynamic equations, coupled with an atomic model, radiation transport, and a ray propagation equation. The models solve the equations in a 1.5D or 2D approximation, and predict the spatio-temporal plasma variation of the parameters, including the electron density and temperature, and the ion populations, which are then used to compute the population inversion and the resulting laser gain. A 3D post processor ray trace code was developed to simulate the amplification of stimulated emission along the plasma column length including saturation effects. This allows for the direct calculation of the soft x-ray laser output and its characteristics. Simulation results were compared with experiments conducted at Colorado State University. The general behavior of the plasma and the soft x-ray laser are well described by the model. A specific comparison of the model results with experimental measurements is presented for the case of a collisionally excited 13.2 nm wavelength Ni-like cadmium laser. The model predicts that an optical laser pulse of 1 J energy and 8 ps duration impinging at 23 degrees grazing incidence into a pre-created laser plasma can rapidly heat it to temperatures above 600 eV at a density of 2 x 1020 electrons/cm3 . This results in a computed peak small signal gain coefficient of 150 cm-1 in the 4d 1S0 to 4p 1P1 transition of Ni-like Cd at 13.2 nm. The model indicates that the amplified beam reaches the gain-saturated regime after 2.5 mm of propagation in the plasma, in agreement with the experimental observation of saturated behavior for propagation lengths of 2.5-3.0 mm. The computed soft x-ray laser pulse width of 5-9 ps moderately exceeds the experimental value of 5 ps and is the result of a stronger saturation broadening in the simulation. The simulated laser output energy of the order of 1 μJ is also in agreement with experiments. Simulations of injection-seeded Ne-like Ti and Ni-like Ag amplifiers that show very good agreement with the experimental results are presented. A direct comparison of the pulsewidth and the near and far-field beam profiles is made. Finally, the results of a simulation of a plasma created by irradiation of solid targets with a 46.9 nm soft x-ray laser, in which single photon photoionization is the dominant energy absorption mechanism are presented. Low absorption (silicon, Z=14) and high absorption (chromium, Z=24) targets were heated by ∼1 ns duration soft x-ray laser pulses. The experimental spectra agree with 1½ D simulations in showing that the Si plasmas are significantly colder and less ionized than the Cr plasma, confirming that in contrast to plasmas created by visible wavelength lasers the plasma properties are largely determined by the absorption coefficient of the target material.

Direct pore scale simulations of two-fluid flow on digital rock images provide a promising tool to understand the role of surface wetting phenomena on flow and transport in geologic reservoirs. We present computational protocols that mimic conventional special core analysis laboratory (SCAL) experiments, which are implemented within the open source LBPM software package. Protocols are described to simulate unsteady displacement, steady-state flow at fixed saturation, and to mimic centrifuge experiments. These methods can be used to infer relative permeability and capillary curves, and otherwise understand two-fluid flow behavior based on first principles. Morphological tools are applied to assess image resolution, establish initial conditions, and instantiate surface wetting maps based on the distribution of fluids. Internal analysis tools are described that measure essential aspects of two-fluid flow, including fluid connectivity and surface measures, which are used to track transient aspects of the flow behavior as they occur during simulation. Computationally efficient workflows are developed by combining these components with a two-fluid lattice Boltzmann model to define hybrid methods that can accelerate computations by using morphological tools to incrementally evolve the pore-scale fluid distribution. We show that the described methods can be applied to recover expected trends due to the surface wetting properties based on flow simulation in Benntheimer sandstone.

Models that describe two-fluid flow in porous media suffer from a widely-recognized problem that the constitutive relationships used to predict capillary pressure as a function of the fluid saturation are non-unique, thus requiring a hysteretic description. As an alternative to the traditional perspec- tive, we consider a geometrical description of the capillary pressure, which relates the average mean curvature, the fluid saturation, the interfacial area between fluids, and the Euler characteristic. The state equation is formulated using notions from algebraic topology and cast in terms of measures of the macroscale state. Synchrotron-based X-ray micro-computed tomography ({\\mu}CT) and high- resolution pore-scale simulation is applied to examine the uniqueness of the proposed relationship for six different porous media. We show that the geometric state function is able to characterize the microscopic fluid configurations that result from a wide range of simulated flow conditions in an averaged sense. The geometric state function can serve as a closure relationship within macroscale models to effectively remove hysteretic behavior attributed to the arrangement of fluids within a porous medium. This provides a critical missing component needed to enable a new generation of higher fidelity models to describe two-fluid flow in porous media.

Block iterative methods are extremely important as smoothers for multigrid methods, as preconditioners for Krylov methods, and as solvers for diagonally dominant linear systems. Developing robust and efficient algorithms suitable for current and evolving GPU and multicore CPU systems is a significant challenge. We address this issue in the case of constant-coefficient stencils arising in the solution of elliptic partial differential equations on structured 3D uniform and adaptively refined grids. Robust, highly parallel implementations of block Jacobi and chaotic block Gauss-Seidel algorithms with exact inversion of the blocks are developed using different parallelization techniques. Experimental results for NVIDIA Fermi GPUs and AMD multicore systems are presented.

In [I.R. Khairulin et al., submitted to Phys. Rev. Lett.] we propose a method for amplifying a train of sub-femtosecond pulses of circularly or elliptically polarized extreme ultraviolet (XUV) radiation, constituted by high-order harmonics of an infrared (IR) laser field, in a neon-like active medium of a plasma-based X-ray laser, additionally irradiated with a replica of a fundamental frequency laser field used to generate harmonics, and show the possibility of maintaining or enhancing the ellipticity of high-harmonic radiation during its amplification. In the present paper we describe this process in detail both for a single harmonic component and a sub-femtosecond pulse train formed by a set of harmonics. We derive the analytical theory and describe both analytically and numerically the evolution of the high-harmonic field during its propagation through the medium. We discuss also the possibility of an experimental implementation of the suggested technique in an active medium of an X-ray laser based on neon-like Ti^{12+} ions irradiated by an IR laser field with a wavelength of 3.9 microns.