Sharif Digital Repository

The purpose of this work is to interpret cardiotocograph recordings by estimating kubli score in order to find out the presence of antepartum morbidity in cardiotocograph (CTG) recordings. The Kubli score is a tool used to evaluate a non-stress test (NST). It works very much like an Apgar Score in that there are 5 criteria to be assessed, baseline rate, amplitude of fluctuations, frequency of fluctuations, deceleration and acceleration pattern, and each will be assigned a score of 0, 1, or 2, for a maximum total of 10. The advantage of the Kubli score is that it is systematic and specific. This communication tool helps clinicians to have a visual image of the immediate fetal status. Using... 

This paper gives the final Solution for vibration reduction in a centrifugal pump. Vibration measurement in different conditions has been carried out in order to find the main reason for excessive vibration of the pumps. In the first stage several parameters including cavitation, not working in the pump design condition and mechanical and electrical faults assumed to be the reason for the pump vibration. By vibration analysis it is found that the major reason for the pump vibration is working in off design conditions. More over dissolved air in the suction fluid can possibly cause two-phase flow leading to the pump vibration. For solving both problems considering pump performance curves it... 

In most modern manufacturing systems, products are often the output of several correlated stages. Nevertheless, quality of a product or process in both single and multistage processes is usually expressed by a single quality characteristic, two or more characteristics, or profiles. Although there are many studies in univariate and multivariate-multistage process monitoring, fewer works focus on profile monitoring of multistage processes. This paper addresses the problem of monitoring a simple linear profile that is going through a multistage process in phase II. Using a first-order autoregressive correlation model, the relationship between the stages is first modeled. Then, the cascade... 

Although manual crack inspection has been widely used for structural health monitoring over the last decades, the development of computer vision methods allows continuous monitoring and compensates the human judgment inaccuracy. In this study, an image-based method entitled Arc Length method is introduced for extracting crack pattern characteristics, including crack width and crack length. The method contains two major steps; in the first step, the crack zones are estimated in the whole image. Afterwards, the algorithm finds the start point, follows the crack pattern, and measures the crack features, such as crack width, crack length, and crack pattern angle. The efficiency of the method is... 

Due to role of polymer in increasing sweep efficiency during oil recovery, much attention has been paid to the using polymer solutions in enhanced oil recovery methods. In spite of the existence of the great researches in this area, the role of nanoparticles in modification of the polymer performance in the presence of salts has not been examined before. Furthermore, there is no information about how the dispersed silica nanoparticles affect the heavy oil recovery during the polymer flooding in the presence of divalent cations. In this study, a series of polymer flooding experiments are performed in a quarter five-spot glass micromodel saturated with heavy oil. Solutions of polyacrylamide... 

River water quality monitoring using traditional water sampling and laboratory analyses is expensive and time-consuming. The application of artificial neural network (ANN) models to simulate water quality parameters is cost-effective, quick, and reliable. This study provides two methods of mathematical and ANN modeling to simulate and forecast five important river water quality indicators (DO, TDS, SAR, BOD5, HCO3) correlated with variables such as EC, temperature, and pH which can be measured easily and almost with no cost. The mathematical method is based on polynomial fitting with least square method and the neural network model was developed using a feed-forward algorithm. The 35 years’... 

This paper presents a low complexity while accurate Heart Rate (HR) estimation technique from signals captured by Photoplethysmographic (PPG) sensors worn on the wrist during intensive physical exercise. Wrist-type PPG signals experience severe Motion Artifacts (MA) that hinder efficient HR estimation especially during intensive physical exercises. To suppress the motion artifacts efficiently, simultaneous 3 dimensional acceleration signals are used as reference MAs. The proposed method achieves an Average Absolute Error (AAE) of 1.19 Beats Per Minute (BPM) on the 12 benchmark PPG recordings in which subjects run at speeds of up to 15 km/h. This method also achieves an AAE of 2.17 BPM on the... 

In most modern manufacturing systems, products are often the output of some multistage processes. In these processes, the stages are dependent on each other, where the output quality of each stage depends also on the output quality of the previous stages. This property is called the cascade property. Although there are many studies in multistage process monitoring, there are fewer works on profile monitoring in multistage processes, especially on the variability monitoring of a multistage profile in Phase-I for which no research is found in the literature. In this paper, a new methodology is proposed to monitor the standard deviation involved in a simple linear profile designed in Phase I to... 

Increasing use of commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) superscalar processors in industrial, embedded, and real-time systems necessitates the development of error detection mechanisms for such systems. This paper presents an error detection scheme called Committed Instructions Counting (CIC) to increase error detection in such systems. The scheme uses internal Performance Monitoring features and an external watchdog processor (WDP). The Performance Monitoring features enable counting the number of committed instructions in a program. The scheme is experimentally evaluated on a 32-bit Pentium® processor using software implemented fault injection (SWIFI). A total of 8181 errors were injected into... 

Storage tanks are always under different hazards such as corrosion and leaking. In this work we have introduced a computational analysis on storage tanks in which a real-time yet efficient monitoring technique using Fiber Bragg Grating (FBG) sensors for corrosion detection on the bottom plate and vibration monitoring on outer surfaces of storage tanks is proposed. A finite element model for the tank is developed, in which the outer tanks surfaces are considered as plate elements and FBG sensors as beam elements. An array of FBG sensors is utilized to compute the generated strain in the FBGs due to losing thickness in the tank's bottom plate and due to vibration on the outer surfaces in... 

This paper presents a novel modification to a conventional rolling element bearing that allows it to monitor its own condition, and describes some preliminary tests on a prototype. The self monitoring feature is a thick-film vibration sensor deposited in a shallow groove around the outer race of the bearing. This has the virtue of being very close to the source of the impacts that are characteristic of a damaged bearing, as well as being robust and low cost. The form of the sensor is such that the loading surfaces of the outer race are only slightly modified and the bearing can be fitted into any conventional bearing housing with only minor modification to make electrical connection to the... 

During power system restoration, it is necessary to check the phase angle between two buses before closing circuit breakers to connect a line between them. A novel approach for reducing large standing phase angle (SPA) based on Genetic Algorithm (GA) is presented in this paper. The proposed approach starts with a state estimation on Wide Area Monitoring System (WAMS) data measurements and considering power system operation and angular stability constraints, seeks an optimal control action scenario for reducing SPA. Since these constraints are evaluated based on WAMS data, the presented approach is considerably high speed and accurate. As an optimization problem, objective function of the... 

PPG based heart rate (HR) monitoring has recently attracted much attention with the advent of wearable devices such as smart watches and smart bands. However, due to severe motion artifacts (MA) caused by wristband stumbles, PPG based HR monitoring is a challenging problem in scenarios where the subject performs intensive physical exercises. This work proposes a novel approach to the problem based on supervised learning by Neural Network (NN). By simulations on the benchmark datasets [1], we achieve acceptable estimation accuracy and improved run time in comparison with the literature. A major contribution of this work is that it alleviates the need to use simultaneous acceleration signals.... 

Over past decades, extensive research has been performed on the measurement of land subsidence as a result of compaction of aquifer. This paper describes results from a new field-monitoring system to evaluate changes in matric suction and temperature profiles in soil layers over an extended time period. The monitoring system used in this study consists of inserting dielectric sensors into a 105 m borehole, drilled in a site in Ardabil Plain, The monitoring results from the site were used to calibrate predictions from HYDRUS-1D. The physical and hydraulic properties of the soil materials in different layers were obtained through performing some soil characteristics and filter paper tests... 

Processes with multiple correlated categorical quality characteristics are called multivariate categorical processes. These processes are usually shown by contingency tables and are characterized by log-linear models. In this paper, two monitoring approaches including likelihood ratio test (LRT) and F test are developed to monitor multivariate categorical processes based on the contingency table in Phase I. In addition, a change point estimator for multivariate categorical processes is developed in Phase I. The performances of the two proposed approaches are evaluated in terms of probability of signal, while the performance of the proposed change point estimator is evaluated in terms of... 

The reliability of power electronic based converters has become increasingly important due to their wide-spread use in industry. An effective method to increase the availability of converters is to use condition monitoring systems for planning scheduled maintenances. This paper provides a method to monitor the condition of IGBTs in a back-to-back converter based on their on-state voltage measurement. Using the proposed system adds limited number of elements to the circuit but can be implemented independent from the converter. Considering the converter topology has made the proposed method applicable for condition monitoring of switches in different back-to-back converters. This advantage...