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Abstract The frequent occurrence of casing failure has significantly affected the development of shale gas in the Sichuan Basin. Based on engineering and geology analyses, natural fracture/fault slip leads to casing shear deformation during hydraulic fracturing. Hence, natural fracture/fault slip and casing‐cement sheath‐formation assembly finite element models were established to quantitatively examine the characteristics of natural fracture/fault slip and mechanisms of casing shear deformation. Many factors, such as formation elastic property, in situ stress, natural fracture/fault geometry property, fluid pressure, casing elastic property, cement sheath elastic property, and well trajectory, were considered. The simulated results were in good agreement with the field data. The results indicated that natural fracture/fault slip leads to a sharp increase in casing deformation and stress in the adjacent region. Furthermore, factor sensitivity analysis results showed that a higher fluid pressure, larger fracture length, larger fracture dip angle, higher in situ stress difference, lower formation Young's modulus, and shorter distance from the wellbore to the center of the slip surface lead to severe casing stress and deformation. The countermeasures for preventing casing shear deformation involve decreasing the fracturing treatment pressure, reducing the crossing angle between the wellbore and natural fracture/fault, maintaining a safe distance from the wellbore to the large fracture/fault center, and adopting “balanced stress” fracturing operation. Hence, this study proposes a reasonable method to evaluate casing shear damage under hydraulic fracturing.

In this study, new kinds of hydrogen-bonded (H-bonded) chiral molecular switches (CMS) composed of azobenzene moieties as photo-responsive parts and H-bonded complexes as thermo-responsive parts were developed. Photo- and thermally-reversible switching behavior of cholesteric liquid crystals (Ch-LCs) based on the H-bonded CMS was investigated in detail. The results demonstrate that H-bonded CMS undergo a trans-cis photoisomerization under UV light, which results in the decrease of helical twisting power (HTP). Meanwhile, the modulation of the intermolecular forces between proton donors and acceptors with temperature has a positive influence on the change in HTP. Reversible blue, green, and red reflections of the self-organized helical superstructure could be achieved under UV/Vis light as well as with temperature change. According to the geometry optimization based on Gaussian 03 calculations at the B3LYP/6-31G(d) level, the molecular aspect ratio could be considered to be one of the important factors influencing the HTP of H-bonded CMS. This dynamic tuning of the self-organized helical superstructure based on dual and selective molecular mechanism opens up a way to achieve new kinds of LC photonic materials. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes the architecture and IC implementation of a rectangular-to-polar coordinate converter for digital communication applications. The architecture core uses small lookup ROMs, fast multipliers, and a single angle-rotation stage. Area and latency are reduced in comparison with traditional methods. The processor, implemented in 0.25-µm five-metal CMOS, has 14-b in-phase and quadrature channel inputs and 15-b magnitude and phase channel outputs. The phase and magnitude calculations have a maximum error of 0.00024 (0.0078% of π) and 0.03 (1% of 2√2), respectively. Computational latency is 19 cycles, and power dissipation is 470 mW at 2.5 V and 406 MHz (Mconversions/s). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A 300-MHz quadrature direct digital frequency synthesizer/complex mixer (QDDSM) chip is presented. With a 32-bit input frequency control word, the tuning resolution is 0.07 Hz at the operating frequency of 300 MHz. The 12-bit I and Q inputs and 13-bit I and Q outputs offer a spurious-free dynamic range of 90.3 dB. The tuning latency is 13 clock cycles, which corresponds to 43 ns at 300 MHz. The tuning bandwidth (half the operating frequency) is 150 MHz. The IC is realized in 0.25-μm TSMC CMOS technology with 4180 standard library cells and occupies a core area of 0.36 mm2. At 300 MHz, the power dissipation is less than 400 mW. A key feature of the design is the creation of conditionally negating multipliers. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]