Sharif Digital Repository

Nowadays, the world is facing a shortage of fresh water. Utilizing adsorbent materials to adsorb air moisture is a suitable method for producing freshwater, especially combining the adsorption desalination system with solar energy devices such as solar collectors. The low temperature of solar collectors has caused some water to remain in the adsorbents in the desorption process and has reduced the possibility of using these systems. In this research, for the first time, an evacuated tube collector (ETC) is used as an adsorbent bed so that the temperature of the desorption process reaches higher values and as a result, more fresh water is expected to produced. In this study, two adsorption... 

To increase heat transfer, ferrofluids have been utilized to study the effective parameters of pool boiling. Changes and possible enhancement of pool boiling heat transfer of magnetic fluids is a function of magnetic field and concentration of nanoparticles. To the best knowledge of the authors, no systematic experiments have been conducted to visualize the phenomena during the boiling of ferrofluids with different concentrations. In this study an experimental investigation has been conducted, by designing and fabricating a novel hele-shaw vessel with glass sides, to explore via visualizations some details in the pool boiling of ferrofluids. Boiling patterns of ferrofluids at various... 

This study presents the results of failure analysis of a 28 MW gas turbine at the Rei electrical power plant. The gas turbine failed during the shutdown period and near its second natural frequency at 4200 rpm. Initial inspections revealed that the compressor disk of stage 15 was fractured, and all of the stationary and rotary blades of stages 14-18 of the compressor had been detached or broken from the dovetail region of the disks. The fracture roots were investigated by performing finite element modeling and fractography analysis. It was shown that a crack was initiated from the disk edge on its interface with the rotor shaft and was propagated under cyclic loading. As a result of the... 

Hastening the power industry reregulation juxtaposed with the unprecedented utilization of uncertain renewable energies (REs), faces power system operation with sever uncertainties. Consequently, uncertainty assessment of system performance is an obligation. This paper reviews the probabilistic techniques used for probabilistic optimal power flow (P-OPF) studies and proposes a novel and powerful approach using the unscented transformation (UT) method. The heart of the proposed method lies in how to produce the sampling points. Appropriate sampling points are chosen to perform the P-OPF with a high degree of accuracy and less computational burden compared with features of other existing... 

Hastening the power industry reregulation juxtaposed with the unprecedented utilization of uncertain renewable energies (REs), faces power system operation with sever uncertainties. Consequently, uncertainty assessment of system performance is an obligation. This paper reviews the probabilistic techniques used for probabilistic optimal power flow (P-OPF) studies and proposes a novel and powerful approach using the unscented transformation (UT) method. The heart of the proposed method lies in how to produce the sampling points. Appropriate sampling points are chosen to perform the P-OPF with a high degree of accuracy and less computational burden compared with features of other existing... 

In this paper, we consider a special version of the well-known line-simplification problem for simplifying the boundary of a region illuminated by a point light source q, or its visibility polygon VP(q). In this simplification approach, we should take the position of q as an essential factor into account to determine the quality of the resulting simplification. For this purpose, we redefine the known distance- and area-distortion error criteria as the main simplification criteria to take into account the distance between the observer q and the boundary of VP(q). Based on this, we propose algorithms for simplifying VP(q). More precisely, we propose simplification algorithms of O(n2) and... 

Obtaining a reliable reservoir permeability map that is consistent with all available data is of great important for reservoir engineers. However, there is not enough core from existing wells to estimate the reservoir permeability directly but Well log data are more widely available. This study aims to model permeability within the reservoir while there is no enough data. In particular, we use artificial neural networks to estimate permeability using four input logs of sonic, gravity, porosity and neutron logs in six existing wells. In order to eliminate the correlated data, we have done Principal Component Analysis on selected input logs. Collocated cokriging is considered as a valuable... 

In this paper, we propose a method for maintaining the region visible from a moving point observer inside a planar scene. In this method, we check the observer position in discrete time-stamps to detect and apply changes to the visible or illuminated region of a moving point observer q, or VP(q). We efficiently maintain a list C(q) of edges in VP(q) which are subject to change during the motion. In each time-stamp that VP(q) is to be updated, we only refine and redraw the view against the edges of C(q) that indicate the positions of the visibility changes. We build an enriched representation of the visibility graph in a preprocessing step to apply the required updates on C(q) efficiently and... 

In this paper, we consider the problem of computing the visibility of a query point inside polygons with holes. The goal is to perform this computation efficiently per query considering the cost of the preprocessing phase. Our algorithm is based on solutions in [A.L.P. Bose, J.I. Munro, Efficient visibility queries in simple polygons, Computational Geometry: Theory and Applications 23 (3) (2002) 313-335] and [M.T.B. Aronov, L. Guibas, L. Zhang, Visibility queries and maintenance in simple polygons, Discrete and Computational Geometry 27 (4) (2002) 461-483] proposed for simple polygons. In our solution, the preprocessing is done in time O( n3logn) to construct a data structure of size O( n3).... 

In this paper, we consider the problem of computing the visibility of a query point inside polygons with holes. The goal is to perform this computation efficiently per query with more cost in the preprocessing phase. Our algorithm is based on solutions in [13] and [2] proposed for simple polygons. In our solution, the preprocessing is done in time O(n3 log(n)) to construct a data structure of size O(n3). It is then possible to report the visibility polygon of any query point q in time O((1 + h′) log n + |V(q)|), in which n and h are the number of the vertices and holes of the polygon respectively, |V(q)| is the size of the visibility polygon of q, and h′ is an output and preprocessing... 

Fuzzy Control of rowing exercise using Functional Electrical Stimulation (FES) concerns ankle, knee and hip joints. Muscular Modeling for each joint may contain two groups of muscles, namely extension and flexion. In the proposed method, joint controllers provide electrical stimulation pulses to the appropriate muscle group based on the trajectory error and according to a prescribed pattern designed for rowing exercise. Results indicate that the simulated Fuzzy control of desired angles closely match the experimental values for prescribed joints. Moreover, the robustness of the controller in presence of external disturbance is examined and the results show that the tracking of each joint... 

Microgrid (MG) protection is one of the main challenges in proliferation of microgrids. Due to limited fault current feeding of inverter-based distributed generations (DGs), in islanded operation of MG, protection problems become more complicated; and, therefore, conventional protection strategies cannot be applied. Hence, new protection methods that are applicable in islanded and grid-connected modes of operation are necessary. In this paper, a comprehensive digital-relay based protection is introduced for the protection of MGs. The proposed method includes protection of lines, distributed generations, and the point of common coupling. The structure and graphical schematic of the proposed... 

In this paper, vehicle longitudinal velocity during the braking process is estimated by measuring the wheels speed. Here, a new algorithm based on the unknown input Kalman filter is developed to estimate the vehicle longitudinal velocity with a minimum mean square error and without using the value of braking torque in the estimation procedure. The stability and convergence of the filter are analysed and proved. Effectiveness of the method is shown by designing a real experiment and comparing the estimation result with actual longitudinal velocity computing from a three-axis accelerometer output  

Measuring the coupling of single neuron's spiking activities to the local field potentials (LFPs) is a method to investigate neuronal synchronization. The most important synchronization measures are phase locking value (PLV), spike field coherence (SFC), pairwise phase consistency (PPC), and spike-triggered correlation matrix synchronization (SCMS). Synchronization is generally quantified using the PLV and SFC. PLV and SFC methods are either biased on the spike rates or the number of trials. To resolve these problems the PPC measure has been introduced. However, there are some shortcomings associated with the PPC measure which is unbiased only for very high spike rates. However evaluating... 

In this paper, based on Kirchhoff plate theory (CLPT), vibration analysis of an arbitrary nonlinear variable thickness annular isotropic plate which is covered with piezoelectric layers on the top and bottom surfaces in a short circuit state is performed using a semi-analytic method, named modified wave method (MWM). The plate is partitioned into several continuous segments with constant thicknesses, for which there exists exact analytical solutions. Considering wave method, the solution of each segment is assumed to be the combination of waves moving forward and backward, and at each step, waves in positive and negative directions are obtained in terms of waves at the inner edge of the... 

Solar heating and cooling technologies can have a vital role to play in understanding the targets in energy security, economic development, and mitigating climate change. This study aimed to investigate the performance of the combined solar cooling/heating system using a Photovoltaic Thermal collector (PVT) for residential applications. The main advantage of using PVT is the conversion of the maximum amount of solar energy into electricity and thermal energy. In this work, water is used to cool the panel and, consequently, increase the efficiency. The cooling cycle comprises a hybrid ejector-compression refrigeration cycle with two evaporator temperatures. To reduce the effect of the global... 

Many Middle-East countries, like Iran, have dynamic banking industries and have observed merger and acquisitions (M&A) waves. M&A waves are usually defined in the developed world context and some of their main drivers were identified as: market timing, environment's shocks, merger manias, government regulation and regulatory, and technological changes. It has been discussed that merger waves and their reasons are among the ten most important unsolved mysteries in the field of finance (Brealey and Myers, 1991, p. 923), and as a result of this, it was not possible to completely clarify the reasons behind emerging M&A waves, especially in developing countries; for this reason in these... 

This chapter aims at pointing out that how mergers and acquisitions (M&As) as popular strategies which they are based on external growth approach have affected the performance of banks and entrepreneurial orientation (EO) in the context of Iranian financial sector. In this regard, it has been tried to investigate in what way EO moderates the relationships between the performance of banks in one hand, and M&As on the other hand. For this goal, 114 participants including the top and middle managers of the Iranian banks were chosen to be closely considered. The research is an applied research and a cross-correlation methodology has been used to spotlight on the probable relationships between EO... 

Geostatistical methods are grouped in two main divisions: univariate and multivariate. When there is adequate amount of primary data, univariate methods such as kriging and SGS give a good representation of property distribution in the reservoir, but practical difficulties appear when there is no sufficient data. In such a case it is necessary to choose multivariate geostatistical methods in which some covariables are contributed to model the primary variable. Multivariate geostatistics is a broad term that encompasses all geostatistical methods that utilize more than one variable to predict some physical property of the earth. Bivariate geostatistics is obviously the simplest subset of the...