Summary: Wax or paraffin formation in subsea pipelines is a major problem in the upstream petroleum industry, accounting for tremendous economic losses. Researchers have reported that approximately 85% of the world's oils encounter problems from wax formation (Thota and Onyeanuna 2016). In this manuscript, the authors briefly discuss the mechanism of wax formation in pipelines. Next, a review of various wax-mitigation technologies is provided. The review includes citations of various thermal, chemical, mechanical, biological, and other innovative methods reported by previous researchers and used in the industry.

The urban heat island (UHI) effect increases the ambient temperatures in cities and alters the energy budget of building materials. Urban surfaces such as pavements and roofs absorb solar heat and re-emit it back into the atmosphere, contributing towards the UHI effect. Over the past few decades, researchers have identified albedo and thermal inertia as two of the most significant thermal properties that influence pavement surface temperatures under a given solar load. However, published data for comparisons of albedo and thermal inertia are currently inadequate. This work focuses on asphalt and concrete as two important materials used in the construction of pavements. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) analyses are performed on asphalt and concrete pavements with the same dimensions and under the same ambient conditions. Under given conditions, the pavement top surface temperature is evaluated with varying albedo and thermal inertia values. The results show that the asphalt surface temperatures are consistently higher than the concrete surface temperatures. Surface temperatures under solar load reduce with increasing albedo and thermal inertia values for both asphalt and concrete pavements. The CFD results show that increasing the albedo is more effective in reducing pavement surface temperatures than increasing the thermal inertia.

This study evaluates the freezing response of three different cell types, Pacific oyster embryos (~50 µm in diameter), Jurkat cells and HeLa cells (~12 to 15 µm’s in diameter), using cryomicroscopy. Freezing experiments were performed on oyster embryos at cooling rates of either 5 or 10 °C/min, while Jurkats were cooled at either 1 or 10 °C/min and HeLa cells were cooled at either 1, 15 or 20 °C/min, respectively. The experiments with oyster embryos were primarily designed to investigate the phenomena of intracellular ice formation (IIF) while the experiments for Jurkat and HeLa cells were designed to investigate both cellular dehydration and IIF during freezing. IIF was characterized by the abrupt black flashing during the cooling steps while the cellular dehydration experiments were characterized by the volumetric (projected area) shrinkage of the cells during the cooling steps. Mathematical models were fit to the cellular dehydration data to obtain the Jurkat and HeLa cell membrane permeability (L_pg) at the reference temperature (273.15 K), the apparent activation energy of the cellular dehydration process (E_Lp) or the temperature dependence of L_pg. The temperature dependence of IIF in the oyster embryos, the Jurkat cells and the HeLa cells were also determined.