An Experimental Study on Percolation Characteristics of a Single-PhaseGas in a Low-Permeability Volcanic Reservoir Under High Pressure
In this paper, we find that with the decrease in the average pore pressure in the process of gas production, both the slippage effect and the stress sensitivity effect will gradually increase; the increase in the slippage effect is significant, while the increase in the stress sensitivity effect is not. In this paper, the Kalamay volcanic gas reservoir of the Junggar Basin in China was selected as the object of our research. The gas reservoir has typical fractured volcanic reservoirs, and the long-term percolation feature remains unclear. To study the percolation characteristics of single- phase gas under high pressure, the experimental method was designed to simulate these characteristics in the process of gas production by measuring the gas flow in the core and the input and output pressure at both ends. We carried out simulation experiments of single-phase gas flow percolation characteristics under high pressure using 11 pieces of vol- canic rock samples in three wells of the study area. The results show that as the core pore pressure increased, the per- meability of low-permeability cores of the volcanic rock decreased significantly at room temperature. However, this decrease became more gradual, which means that the higher the core pore pressure is, the smaller the permeability variation caused by gas slippage is; when the pore pressure is above 10 MPa, the permeability is nearly constant, slip- page effect significantly reduces in the process of gas percolation, so it can be completely ignored under these forma- tion conditions. As the pore pressure decreases, the slippage effect and stress sensitivity effect will gradually increase; when the pore pressure is less than 10 MPa, the permeability appears to increase significantly, and this is especially true for a pressure of 5 MPa. The main cause of this result is the slippage effect of gas seepage during the depletion of the gas reservoir, when the pore pressure is lower than a certain value. The valid stress changes of the core are not large, and the stress sensitivity is not strong, so the slippage effect plays a major role, which leads to an increase in the gas permeability during the late period of certain flow gas production.
Experimental Study on Gas Seepage in Rock
In order to investigate the characteristics of gas seepage in rock, laboratory tests on one-dimensional seepage were carried out for several columnar rock samples (andesites, granites and tuffs). The permeabilities of gas seepage in dried and saturated rocks are discussed based on test results and theoretical approach. Nonlinear relationships between seeping gas flow rate and acting pressure were obtained experimentally, and the intrinsic permeabilities lay in the range from 10−19 to 10−15 m2 for the rock specimens employed in these experiments.
Electrophysiological evidence that a subset of midbrain dopamine neurons integrate the reward signal induced by electrical stimulation of the posterior mesencephalon
This study was aimed at determining whether midbrain dopamine (DA) neurons are trans-synaptically activated by rewarding electrical stimulation applied near the midline in the posterior mesencephalon (PM), and in the affirmative, whether the increase in firing was proportional to the rewarding effectiveness of the stimulation. Experiments were performed on male Long-Evans rats trained to lever press to obtain 400 ms trains of cathodal rectangular pulses. Following the training period, curves relating the rates of responding to the stimulation frequencies were determined at two current intensities and reward thresholds were calculated for each animal. Each animal was then anesthetized with urethane (1.2 g/kg, i.p.) and firing rate of DA neurons were recorded before, during, and after each of 50 trains (1 train/3 s) of stimulation to the PM using stimulation parameters that either sustained near threshold responding (rewarding), or failed to sustain responding (non-rewarding), in the behavioral tests. A total of 24 DA cells were recorded from 13 behaviorally trained animals, and of these, 17 (71%) responded to rewarding stimulation by an increase in firing, five (21%) were unresponsive and two (8%) were inhibited. In 12 of the 17 cells that were activated, the increase in firing was proportional to the rewarding effectiveness of the stimulation rather than the total strength of the stimulation. These results provide evidence that a subset of midbrain DA neurons are trans-synaptically activated by rewarding PM stimulation and constitute a second, or subsequent, stage of the reward-relevant pathway that integrates the PM reward signal.