Flood-Control Technology

See also Civil Engineering Climate Modeling Earthquake Engineering Erosion Control Flood-Control Technology Fluid Dynamics Ocean and Tidal Energy Technologies Oceanography Water-Pollution Control. 

Flood-control technology deals with the myriad techniques that can be employed to deal with water that overflows stream banks, thereby leading to deaths and injuries, property and crop damage, and severe erosion. The magnitude of the flood damage varies considerably, as it depends on the duration of the storm and the amount of precipitation. Each watershed has different physical features, such as size, slope, basin relief, impoundments, flood history, soil types, and drainage characteristics. 

Flood-control technology includes various structural and nonstructural measures that play a substantial role in mitigating flood damages. The methods... 

Fascinating Facts About Flood-Control Technology... 

Recent research and field tests have focused on the use of relatively low concentrations or volumes of chemicals as additives to other oil recovery processes. Of particular interest is the use of surfactants as CO (184) and steam mobility control agents (foam). Also combinations of older EOR processes such as surfactant enhanced alkaline flooding and alkaline-surfactant-polymer flooding have been the subjects of recent interest. Older technologies polymer flooding (185,186) and micellar flooding (187-189) have been the subject of recent reviews. In 1988 84 commercial products polymers, surfactants, and other additives, were listed as being marketed by 19 companies for various enhanced oil recovery applications (190). 

Early researchers sought to choose appropriate surfactants for mobility control from the hundreds or thousands that might be used, but very little of the technology base that they needed had yet been created. Since then, work on micellar/polymer flooding has established several phase properties that must be met by almost any EOR surfactant, regardless of the application. This list of properties includes a Krafft temperature that is below the reservoir temperature, even if the connate brine contains a high concentration of divalent ions (i.e., hardness tolerance), and a lower consolute solution temperature (cloud point) that is above the reservoir temperature. 

Several field tests of injectivity and of various types of surfactant-based mobility control for gas flooding have been reported in the literature. These are briefly reviewed for clues to possible future directions for the technology and as a guide to the research and development needed for achieving technical success and commercialization of surfactant-based mobility control for gas flooding. 

---