Sharif Digital Repository

The 3A zeolite is an excellent adsorbent for natural gas dehydration due to low energy requirement in regeneration step and easy operation. To perform a reliable modeling, a good equilibrium adsorption isotherm is mandatory. Accordingly, water, methane, methyl mercaptan (M-mercaptan) and CO2 adsorption isotherms and also the competitive adsorption loading versus temperature are described for the system using molecular simulation and mathematical models. It is found that CO2 competes with water for adsorption on 3A and lower temperature is required for selective removal of water. The mathematical model results showed that M-mercaptan and CO2 quickly adsorb on 3A and capacity of 3A for water... 

In many radar and EW applications, after some processing, the envelope of the received pulse is calculated and is used for target detection. Most of the time only the effect of thermal noise is considered in such detectors, but in most of the practical applications, before envelope detection, the signal should be down converted from radio frequency (RF) to an intermediate frequency (IF). In this case, the phase noise of the local oscillator will affect the signal, too. Surprisingly, in contrast to thermal noise, the effect of phase noise on the envelope of signal becomes more considerable whenever the IF bandwidth is decreased. So there exists an optimum IF bandwidth for the receiver. In... 

Presence of sulfur components in liquid fuels should be controlled due to environmental issues and process considerations. In order to decrease the level of sulfurous compounds in crude gas-oil with 5750 ppmw sulfur, electrochemical oxidative desulfurization has been investigated over electrodes of copper and stainless steel because of their easy operation and mild process conditions. In this research, the effects of stirring rate, temperature, applied potential, sodium hydroxide addition as electrolyte media and water volume have been examined on the sulfur removal efficiency. The results show that electrical conductivity of gas-oil sharply increases with addition of electrolyte up to 613... 

To reduce the sulfur content of crude diesel, several sets of experiments have been conducted using electrochemical oxidative desulfurization technique using electrolyte of NaOH at different applied voltages. Due to impacts of operating parameters on desulfurization, kinetic study is pursued and it is found that the kinetic follows a second order reaction rate with a high accuracy. The reaction of desulfurization was modeled using COMSOL and followed by coupled electrochemical oxidation-extraction, while the extraction process was particularly performed using process simulator. The effects of different solvents on extraction performance were studied and dimethyl sulfoxide was selected for... 

An industrial condensate stabilizer unit is simulated with HYSYS 3.1 software when the excessive water is present on the trays. Effects of reboiler temperature, excess water flow rate, and incoming stream temperature on the Reid vapor pressure (RVP), temperature distribution along the column and impurity concentrations along the stabilization column, as well as, energy usage are studied. In addition, the optimal location for the water draw tray for the condensate stabilizer column is found. It is observed that the presence of water draw pan in the column leads to about 15% and 28% reduction, respectively, in the reboiler and the compressor duties compared to the industrial case without water... 

In this study, a thermal vacuum distillation amine reclaimer unit was industrially and theoretically investigated to remove HSS from a salty amine stream. The presence of ions in the salty amine solution limits application of computer simulation tools to study the process. A thermodynamic equivalent scheme was used for thermal vacuum distillation amine reclaimer, for first time and the simulation results were totally conformed to experimental and industrial data. The effect of critical parameters namely reclaimer vacuum pressure, re-circulation flow rate and HSS amount on performance of thermal amine reclaiming was investigated based on increasing amine solution quality, amine recovery,... 

The 3A zeolites are excellent adsorbents for industrial-scale gas dehydration because of the low energy required for regeneration and ease of operation. A computational study of the dehydration of an industrial feed stream containing ethane and water was performed using an in-house code that included an appropriate equilibrium adsorption isotherm. The validated computational model was used to examine the impact of particle size on the process dynamics and the corresponding pressure drop. The water concentration along the adsorption column was also investigated. To increase the process capacity, the packed adsorption bed was divided into two distinct layers, which were operated with different... 

Over the last decades, several approaches have been proposed in the literature to incorporate users' perceptions of travel costs, their bounded rationality, and risk-taking behaviors into network equilibrium modeling for traffic assignment problem. While theoretically advanced, these models often suffer from high complexity and computational cost and often involve parameters that are difficult to estimate. This study proposes an alternative approach where users' imprecise perceptions of travel times are endogenously constructed as fuzzy sets based on the probability distributions of random link travel times. Two decision rules are proposed accordingly to account for users' heterogeneous... 

Zeolitic imidazole frameworks (ZIFs) provide an exciting platform to design and fabricate non-precious-metal carbon-based catalysts for oxygen reduction/evolution reaction (ORR/OER). Herein, we elaborately design a facile enzyme-assisted synthetic strategy that enables to tailor the ZIFs precursors into structural stable decussation shape, which derived Co nanoislands grafted on decussate N-doped carbon nanoleaves (D-Co@NC) can well retain the interpenetrating nanostructure. Benefiting from the combined advantages of compositions and interpenetrating nanostructures, D-Co@NC possesses 5.2 times higher exposed electrochemical active area than the conventional dodecahedral one, thus endowing... 

In this paper, the interaction between various window specifications and different climate conditions is investigated. For this purpose, simultaneous effects of several aspects including glazing system, glass type, filling gas, glass thickness, window frame fraction, and interior shading are considered under three different climatic conditions. To evaluate the energy performance of various considered alternatives, the energy simulation of a base case building is evaluated in a computer environment. Using the validated model, the energy analysis is quantitatively performed, and cost-benefit analyses from the viewpoints of both residents and government are carried out based on the domestic and... 

Some tetra substituted derivatives of 2,2′ and 4,4′ bithiazoles have been synthesized and characterized in various solvents  

A mathematical time-dependent and isothermal model based on the grain model has been developed to simulate the kinetic and thermal behaviors of a porous iron oxide pellet undergoing chemical reactions with a mixture of hydrogen, carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide and water vapor. Its novelty consists in fact that it can deal with a multi-species reducing gas and oxide pellet. In spite of previous models in which the pure reductant was applied as reducing gas, this model can indicate an actual view of pellet reduction including the effects of reducing gas utility and reducing gas ratio. A finite volume fully implicit technique was applied for solving the governing equations. The model has been... 

In the present study, for the first time, a thermodynamically consistent large deformation theory is developed to model the multi physics problem of axonal swelling which is the hallmark of most of the brain diseases. To this end, the relevant axonal compartments are first explained and the corresponding model parts are introduced. Next, the problem is formulated as an open thermodynamic system and the corresponding constitutive and evolution equations are extracted utilizing the balance laws. Here, a multiplicative decomposition of the deformation gradient is used to capture the active behavior of the axonal actin cortex. Specific free energy functions are given for the model parts to... 

Rockfall is a significant hazard to sites that are located at the foot of rock slopes. In such sites, there is a notable need to evaluate the potential for rockfall, estimate the extent of areas at risk, and design retaining structures to reduce the risk of rockfall-induced. This paper presents a probabilistic framework for predicting the formation and progression of rockfalls and for evaluating the performance of retaining walls under rockfalls. To this end, first a probabilistic model for the rock projectile motion on a slope is presented. The model accounts for prevailing uncertainties, i.e., the trigger points, rock shape, projectile path, and slope material properties, which include... 

This paper presents an effective control scheme in dc microgrids to precisely share the load current oscillatory and dc components among distributed generation (DG) units. The proposed control strategy includes current and voltage control blocks. The current control block consists of oscillatory and dc current-sharing units. The main idea of the proposed method is to share the load current oscillatory and dc components among the DG units based on their rated power, by assigning appropriate output impedance values and droop coefficients to each DG unit. The voltage control block is a multiloop voltage control unit employed to control the microgrid voltage. The detailed model of the proposed... 

We study the asymmetric primordial fluctuations in a model of inflation in which translational invariance is broken by a domain wall. We calculate the corrections to the power spectrum of curvature perturbations; they are anisotropic and contain dipole, quadrupole, and higher multipoles with non-trivial scale-dependent amplitudes. Inspired by observations of these multipole asymmetries in terms of two-point correlations and variance in real space, we demonstrate that this model can explain the observed anomalous power asymmetry of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) sky, including its characteristic feature that the dipole dominates over higher multipoles. We test the viability of the... 

NiTi alloys have exhibited significant potential as a matrix of wear resistant composites. In this study, in order to examine the effect of starting materials on the wear performance of NiTi-based composites, both elemental Ni/Ti and prealloyed NiTi powders were used to fabricate NiTi-6wt% nano-Al2O3 composites using hot isostatic pressing (HIP). Nanoindentation and microhardness test results indicate that the composite samples produced from the elemental Ni/Ti powders exhibited higher hardness and lower pseudoelasticity properties than those of the samples fabricated from the prealloyed NiTi powders; this is attributed to the higher amount of... 

Deployment of low-power low-cost small access points such as femtocell access points (FAPs) constitute an attractive solution for improving the existing macrocell access points' (MAPs) capacity, reliability, and coverage. However, FAP deployment faces challenging problems such as interference management and the lack of flexible frameworks for deploying the FAPs by the service providers (SPs). In this paper, we propose a novel solution that jointly associates the user equipment (UE) to the APs, and allocates the FAPs to the SPs such that the the total satisfaction of the UEs in an uplink OFDMA network is maximized. We model the competitive behaviors among the UEs, FAPs, and SPs as a dynamic... 

In this study, the enhanced trichloroethylene (TCE) degradation performance was investigated by polyvinyl alcohol coated calcium peroxide nanoparticles (PVA@nCP) as an oxidant in Fe(II)-based catalytic systems. The nanoscale iron sulfide (nFeS), having an average particle size of 115.4 nm, was synthesized in the laboratory and characterized by SEM, TEM, HR-TEM along with EDS elemental mapping, XRD, FTIR, ICP-OES, and XPS techniques. In only ferrous iron catalyzed system (PVA@nCP/Fe(II)), TCE degradation was recorded at 58.9% in 6 h. In comparison, this value was increased to 97.5% or 99.7% with the addition of citric acid (CA) or nFeS in PVA@nCP/Fe(II) system, respectively. A comparative...