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Journalists construct a public image through each of their produced texts. Regarding cinema journalism, the feature stories are the result of multiple semiotic relationships established between the cinematographic products, the artists involved with the cinema production, and the possible expectations of the readers related to the journalistic texts, as well as viewers of the films and the depicted artistic contexts. A semiotic analysis of a feature story on the documentary Todos os Paulos do Mundo, written by the journalist Luiz Carlos Merten, reveals the construction of what semiotics calls signic actions. Such actions recover the film creation process and its produced meaning related to contemporary Brazilian production of cinematography.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a numerical method to model the simultaneous propagation of multiple hydraulic fractures (HFs) with fluid lags driven from a horizontal wellbore.

Fracture propagation in solid medium is modeled with the extended finite element method and fluid flow is modeled with finite volume method. Three iteration loops are introduced to solve the nonlinear system within each time increment, i.e. a Newtonian iteration to solve the solid-fluid coupling system, a Picard iteration to determine fluid front positions and a secant iteration to update fracture lengths.

The propagation of one single HF with a fluid lag is simulated and agrees well with semi-analytical solutions or other numerical results in the literature. The simultaneous propagation of two HFs are then investigated, which demonstrates the ability of the proposed method in capturing the hydraulic fracturing process with multiple fractures and fluid lags.

With the proposed method, one can simulate the simultaneous propagation of multiple HFs with fluid lags, which play a significant role during early-time propagation or when the confinement stress is relatively low (shallow HFs). Solid deformation and fracturing, fluid flow in fractures and in the wellbore are fully coupled, and three iteration loops are introduced to solve the nonlinear system.

The interaction between hydraulic fracture (HF) and natural fracture (NF) in naturally fractured rocks is critical for hydraulic fracturing. This paper aims to focus on investigating the development of tensile and shear debonding zone on the NF caused by the stresses produced by HF, and the influence of NF’s debonding behavior on the interaction between HF and NF.

Theoretically, tensile and shear debonding modes of NF are considered, two dimensionless parameters are proposed to characterize the difficulty of tensile and shear failure of NF, respectively. Numerically, a finite element model combining the extended finite element method and cohesive zone method (CZM) is proposed to study NF’s debonding behavior and its influence on the interaction between HF and NF.

Both theoretical analysis and numerical simulation show the existence of two debonding modes. The numerical results also show that the HF can cross, offset or propagate along the NFs depending on the parameters’ value, resulting in different fracture network and stimulated reservoir volume. When they are large, the NF’s debonding area is small, HF tends to cross the NF and the fracture network is simple; when they are small, the NF’s debonding area is large, HF will propagate along the NF. In addition, HF is easier to propagate along with NF under tensile debonding mode while it is easier to pass through NF under shear debonding mode.

The theoretical and numerical considerations are taken into account in the influence of the debonding of NFs on the interaction between HFs and NFs and the influence on the formation of the fracture network.

The unstable dynamic propagation of multistage hydrofracturing fractures leads to uneven development of the fracture network and research on the mechanism controlling this phenomenon indicates that the stress shadow effects around the fractures are the main mechanism causing this behaviour. Further studies and simulations of the stress shadow effects are necessary to understand the controlling mechanism and evaluate the fracturing effect.

In the process of stress-dependent unstable dynamic propagation of fractures, there are both continuous stress fields and discontinuous fractures; therefore, in order to study the stress-dependent unstable dynamic propagation of multistage fracture networks, a series of continuum-discontinuum numerical methods and models are reviewed, including the well-developed extended finite element method, displacement discontinuity method, boundary element method and finite element-discrete element method.

The superposition of the surrounding stress field during fracture propagation causes different degrees of stress shadow effects between fractures and the main controlling factors of stress shadow effects are fracture initiation sequence, perforation cluster spacing and well spacing. The perforation cluster spacing varies with the initiation sequence, resulting in different stress shadow effects between fractures; for example, the smaller the perforation cluster spacing and well spacing are, the stronger the stress shadow effects are and the more seriously the fracture propagation inhibition arises. Moreover, as the spacing of perforation clusters and well spacing increases, the stress shadow effects decrease and the fracture propagation follows an almost straight pattern. In addition, the computed results of the dynamic distribution of stress-dependent unstable dynamic propagation of fractures under different stress fields are summarised.

A state-of-art review of stress shadow effects and continuum-discontinuum methods for stress-dependent unstable dynamic propagation of multiple hydraulic fractures are well summarized and analysed. This paper can provide a reference for those engaged in the research of unstable dynamic propagation of multiple hydraulic structures and have a comprehensive grasp of the research in this field.

A robot‐linked inspection station for automatic gauging of gudgeon pins for surface finish, diameter and taper, has been set up as a demonstration unit at Brunei University, and has been shown to be reliable from the viewpoint of both instrumentation and robotic placement. It makes a simple reject or accept decision on surface finish and taper, but accommodates three tolerance bands on diameter.

Simultaneous hydrofracturing of multiple perforation clusters in vertical wells has been applied in the stimulation of hydrocarbon resources reservoirs. This technology is significantly impeded due to the challenges in its application to the multilayered reservoirs that comprise multiple interlayers. One of the challenges is the accurate understanding and characterization of propagation and deflection of the multiple hydraulic fractures between reservoirs and embedded interlayers.

Numerical models of the tight multilayered reservoirs containing multiple interlayers were established to study hydrofracturing of multiple perforation clusters and its influencing factors on unstable propagation and deflection of hydraulic fractures. Brittle and plastic multilayered reservoirs fully considering the influences of different in situ stress ratio and physical attributes for reservoir and interlayer strata on propagations of hydraulic fractures were investigated. The combined finite element–discrete element method and mesh refinement strategy were adopted to guarantee the accuracy of stress solutions and reliability of fracture path in computation.

Results show that the shear stress fields between adjacent multiple hydraulic fractures are superposed to cause fractures deflection. Stress shadows induce the shielding effects of hydraulic fractures and inhibit fractures growth to emerge unstable propagation behaviors, and a main single fracture and several minor fractures develop. As the in situ stress ratio increases, hydraulic fractures more easily deflect toward the direction of maximum in situ stress, and stress shadow and mutual interaction effects between them are intensified. Compared to brittle reservoir, plastic-enhanced reservoir may limit fracture growth and cannot form long fracture length; nevertheless, plastic properties of reservoir are prone to induce more microseismic events with larger magnitude.

The obtained fracturing behaviors and mechanisms based on engineering-scale multilayered reservoir may provide effective schemes for controlling and estimating the unstable propagation of multiple hydraulic fractures.

The Convolution Quadrature Method (CQM) has been widely applied to solve transient elastodynamic problems because of its stability and generality. However, the CQM suffers from the problems of huge memory requirement in case of direct implementation in time domain or CPU time in case of its reformulation in Laplace domain. The purpose of this paper is to combine the CQM with the pseudo-initial condition method (PICM) to achieve a good balance between memory requirement and CPU time.

The combined methods first subdivide the whole analysis into a few sub-analyses, which is dealt with the PICM, namely, the results obtained by previous sub-analysis are used as the initial conditions for the next sub-analysis. In each sub-analysis, the time interval is further discretized into a number of sub-steps and dealt with the CQM. For non-zero initial conditions, the pseudo-force method is used to transform them into equivalent body forces. The boundary face method is employed in the numerical implementation. Three examples are analyzed. Results are compared with analytical solutions or FEM results and the results of reformulated CQM.

Results demonstrate that the computation time and the storage requirement can be reduced significantly as compared to the CQM, by using the combined approach.

The combined methods can be successfully applied to the problems of long-time dynamic response, which requires a large amount of computer memory when CQM is applied, while preserving the CQM stability. If the number of time steps is high, then the accuracy of the proposed approach can be deteriorated because of the pseudo-force method.

Presents the scientific methodology from the enlarged cybernetical perspective that recognizes the anisotropy of time, the probabilistic character of natural laws, and the entry that the incomplete determinism in Nature opens to the occurrence of innovation, growth, organization, teleology communication, control, contest and freedom. The new tier to the methodological edifice that cybernetics provides stands on the earlier tiers, which go back to the Ionians (c. 500 BC). However, the new insights reveal flaws in the earlier tiers, and their removal strengthens the entire edifice. The new concepts of teleological activity and contest allow the clear demarcation of the military sciences as those whose subject matter is teleological activity involving contest. The paramount question “what ought to be done”, outside the empirical realm, is embraced by the scientific methodology. It also embraces the cognitive sciences that ask how the human mind is able to discover, and how the sequence of discoveries might converge to a true description of reality.

This paper explains at least some of the major problems related to the subject indexing process and proposes a new approach to understanding the process, which is ordinarily described as a process that takes a number of steps. The subject is first determined, then it is described in a few sentences and, lastly, the description of the subject is converted into the indexing language. It is argued that this typical approach characteristically lacks an understanding of what the central nature of the process is. Indexing is not a neutral and objective representation of a document’s subject matter but the representation of an interpretation of a document for future use. Semiotics is offered here as a framework for understanding the “interpretative” nature of the subject indexing process. By placing this process within Peirce’s semiotic framework of ideas and terminology, a more detailed description of the process is offered which shows that the uncertainty generally associated with this process is created by the fact that the indexer goes through a number of steps and creates the subject matter of the document during this process. The creation of the subject matter is based on the indexer’s social and cultural context. The paper offers an explanation of what occurs in the indexing process and suggests that there is only little certainty to its result.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the basics of semiotic analysis and concept theory that represent two dominant approaches to knowledge representation, and explore how these approaches are fruitful for knowledge organization.

In particular the semiotic theory formulated by the American philosopher C.S. Peirce and the concept theory formulated by Ingetraut Dahlberg are investigated. The paper compares the differences and similarities between these two theories of knowledge representation.

The semiotic model is a general and unrestricted model of signs and Dahlberg's model is thought from the perspective and demand of better knowledge organization system (KOS) development. It is found that Dahlberg's concept model provides a detailed method for analyzing and representing concepts in a KOS, where semiotics provides the philosophical context for representation.

This paper is the first to combine theories of knowledge representation, semiotic and concept theory, within the context of knowledge organization.