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Eötvös number (Bond Number): 007 or gravity override in microchannels?
How do you know that the oil doesn’t rise above the water in the channels, or pores, of your microfluidic chips as a result of the density difference between the fluids? This is a question that we often hear when talking at events or chatting with clients. In short, the answer is no, the oil doesn’t rise above the water, but let’s explore why. Figure 1: Oil and water in
How Astronomy Prepared Me for a Career in Microfluidics
When you think about a technology company that serves heavy industry, what kind of backgrounds do you think the employees have? Many people would assume that it’s a company full of engineers. But at Interface, the employee base is made up of a diverse group of individuals with unique backgrounds – myself included. When I graduated in late 2018 with a PhD in Astronomy, I knew that finding a career outside
Energy Excellence Awards
Interface was founded on the idea that laboratory technology needed to be adapted to help the oil and gas industry solve some of the key problems operators were facing. Specifically, the founders knew that microfluidics could unlock data that operators hadn’t seen before. This data would help them make better decisions faster, while being able to actually show them fluid interactions that wouldn’t have been previously possible.
Lab-On-A-Chip
Imagine a laboratory with liters of reagents and samples, where each operation takes place in individual vessels and instruments. What if all of the laboratory functions could be integrated in a single small portable circuit, or chip, with higher efficiencies, extremely low material consumption (down to nano/pico-liters in fluid volume), less waste production, much faster response time, and more control over the operating condition with real-time monitoring capabilities?
In-situ Methods for Bitumen Extraction: an Overview
Steam-Assisted Gravity Drainage (SAGD) employs the horizontal well pair drilling technique to inject steam into bitumen formations. SAGD involves injecting a large volume of steam from the upper horizontal well, transferring a large amount of heat to bitumen via steam latent heat. Consequently, the viscosity of bitumen drastically declines, making it sufficiently mobile to drain by gravity to the producer (i.e., the lower horizontal well). Since the first SAGD wells
Just how tight is shale anyway?
Just how tight is shale? How difficult is it for oil to flow through this rock compared to much more permeable rock like sandstone? Do lab tests at the beaker-scale actually represent what is happening inside a 50-nm shale pore-throat network? Sơn Đoòng cave passage in Sơn Đoòng cave, Vietnam, is the largest known cave passage in the world by volume. It is 200m (660 ft) high and 150m (500
Why Fluids Matter
You’ve invested the time, effort, and capital, investigating where next to drill. After locating oil, it’s time to set up your drilling production. Right? Wrong. Oils found across Alberta have massive variability and are much different than oil found in the Permian Basin in the United States, and even more different than oil drilled in the North Sea. These differences in molecular composition, and the reservoir they were discovered in,
Why We Exist: an intro to Interface
Three individuals – involved in different elements of an industry ripe for transformation – independently realized that there was a large problem and a major opportunity. That industry is oil and gas, and that problem is the lack of rapid diagnostic testing of fluids making reservoirs and capital less productive and efficient. A professor from Toronto, a reservoir engineer, and a musician-turned-analyst came together to put their innovative and technical