Sharif Digital Repository

Hydro power is a clean energy resource which has numerous advantages over other renewable energy systems including competitiveness with fossil fuel systems, high reliability, considerable potential, and availability of technology. These advantages have drawn attention to hydropower systems. Small Hydro Power (SHP) systems can be used for supplying the demand of rural and remote areas where electricity network rarely exists. SHP may also provide an investment opportunity. Comprehensive analysis of design features and operation of SHP and management of risks involved requires development and application of reliable analytical tools. The present research aims at developing a model for optimal... 

Technology introduces different possibilities to different contexts. Educational milieu is one of those situations where technology plays a crucial role. Computer as an outstanding technological feature has changed our daily life. Computer in the educational contexts has affected the way we learn. Every new innovation has its specifications and problems. Computer like other innovations has aspects that should be investigated. In some cases, computer can distort the tests results and be a source of threat for test validity (construct irrelevant variance). Therefore, the researcher chose to analyze the role of this phenomenon in the assessing procedure. Gender, age, mother tongue, and field of... 

Scheduling has been an active area of research for decades. A substantial amount of work has been done to define, classify, and solve scheduling problems. Most of these problems are computationally difficult to solve, and incorporating other decisions into them increases the complexity of these problems. This thesis focuses on order acceptance and scheduling (OAS) problems, and proposes time-indexed mixed integer and linear programming (MILP) models for the first time. An OAS problem can be defined with parameters of processing time, release date, due date, and deadline for each order. There are also a maximum revenue that will be brought by each order and an importance weight of each order.... 

Due to the expansion of digital system threats, trusted computation with a new approach for countering such threats has emerged. This approach is based on using a hardware module for implementing a trusted platform (TPM). TPM includes a chipset and the trusted systems core. Nowadays many of mobile computers do include this technology. This hardware creates trust using a trust chain and expanding this trust to other parts of the system. The starting point in this chain is the computer BIOS. BIOS is the first code that the system usually executes. One of the most powerful recent attacks on computer systems is to infect the BIOS and other firmware. One of such complicated attacks is the rootkit... 

The problem of spacecraft attitude determination (AD) using thermal data is investigated. Given the Solar space environment, the key dominant mechanism of heat transfer will be radiation, in which the Sun and Earth are the major contributing heat sources that affect the satellite external surface temperatures. In this sense, the net heat fluxes (NHF) of a satellite surface that is insulated against any internal heat communication will only be related to these main radiating sources. In order to utilize the satellite temperature data for AD, a heat attitude model (HAM) that relates the satellite surfaces NHF to its attitude is developed using three orthogonal satellite surfaces. Assuming... 

Given the significance of providing any logical and empirical pieces of evidence to “support the assentation that a test measures the construct as defined and nothing else” (Ary et al., 2013, p. 248), numerous studies have been conducted to investigate construct validity, adopting various approaches. However, there are few studies employing the experimental approach to validation. The current study is aimed at obtaining statistically persuading evidence to answer the question regarding the adequacy of the experimental approach to construct validation, drawing upon the concept of advertising literacy as the construct of the researcher’s concern. To meet this end, the researcher, having... 

thermoacuostic heat pump (THP) is One of the most important thermoacuostic applications which is used for heat lost recovery in industrial applications and civil applications.In this project, we have a quick review on thermoacuostic theory and researches in this field. Also a thermoacuostic heat pump in a lab scale will be designed and analyzed.For achieving this goal, first, mathematical equations of thermoacuostic systems are reviewed; a thermoacuostic heat pump is designed on the base of Tijani method and final model is validated by DeltaEC software. In the next step, after investigating about laboratory equipments which is used in testing process, we generate test matrix and study about... 

To study the interaction between energy sector and the Iranian economy, an energy-economy model has been developed which itself is a part of an integrated model of Energy Planning Support System (EPSS). The model is a dynamic computable general equilibrium (DCGE) model which evaluates the medium to long-term economic developments through investment decisions. Four groups of economic agents have been considered: households, firms, governments and foreign sectors. The economic behavior of each agent along with the institutional links among them has been modeled based on neoclassical theory of general equilibrium. Therefore, the model simulates the working of a market economy and solves for a... 

In recent years, optimization via simulation for the systemswhose objective function has stochastic characteristic and doesn’t explicitly exist in closed form, has attracted considerable interest.Simulation of this kind of systems at times may be veryexpensive. In this research, the constraint simulation optimization problem is considered for solving problems with stochastic features based on metamodels. For this purpose, stochastic Kriging is used as a metamodel. In this method, first, a few feasible points in the solution space are identified by thek-optimal design of experiment and then the simulation runs are performed. In the next step, a metamodel is fitted to all the stochastic... 

The present research aims to examine the influence of response format on the reliability and validity of grammaticality judgment tests, which will also reveal some facts about the superiority of each format. To this end, the grammaticality judgment (GJ) test developed by Gass (1994) was selected as the instrument of the study, which was manipulated in terms of the response format while the original items remained intact. Thus, in the first phase of the study, a multiple-choice GJ test (MCGJT) was constructed to be compared with the traditional form, i.e., the dichotomous type (DGJT). In an interval of a month, the two tests were administered to a group of 110 engineering-major BS students at... 

Traditional assumptions about assessment and learning have been challenged in higher education. Alternative types of assessment have been introduced to align to the students’ learning aims. Although, the growing body of literature of alternative types of assessment such as peer-assessment and self-assessment shed light on the advantages and benefits of embedding assessment in classroom activities, there is not absolute agreement on the consistency and accuracy of these types of assessment. To this aim, this study attempted to investigate the reliability and validity of self-assessment and peer-assessment of Iranian EFL learners’ written and oral production. The data was obtained from 32... 

Validation is an important enterprise especially when the test to be validated is a high-stakes one the results of which bring about life-changing implications for the candidates (Roever, 2001). Messick’s (1988) notion of construct irrelevant factors is pertinent in test validation. Demographic variables like gender, field of study and age can affect test results and interpretations. A fair test needs to be neutral when it comes to construct irrelevant factors such as gender. Differential Item Functioning is a way of making sure that the test does not favor one group of test takers over the others. The current study investigated differential item functioning (DIF) in terms of gender in the... 

In this thesis, we are going to study the consistency properties of one of the most well-known linear estimators – LASSO estimator. First, we bring up some necessary background for introducing this estimator. Then, we are able to introduce primary and secondary forms of LASSO estimator. After that, we prove that primary form of the LASSO estimator is weakly consistent under certain weak conditions. We, also, prove a much stronger statement about the secondary form. We prove that the secondary form is strongly consistent. What’s more, with extra assumptions, we specify the convergence rate of the estimator. Finally, we propose a method for determining free parameter of primary form of LASSO,... 

One of the main problems in human health, both in advanced societies and in growing societies, is a variety of cancers, one of which is brain tumor. One of the non-invasive methods of treating tumors is the use of ultrasound.HIFU (High Intensity Focused Ultrasound) therapy method is known as one of the most advanced surgical techniques in tumor ablation therapy. HIFU are produced and concentrated by powerful transducers. The two main mechanisms in HIFU are mechanical and thermal mechanisms, and the effects of these two mechanisms appear as thermal effects and cavitation. The fundamental mechanism in the HIFU is to absorb ultrasonic waves and to convert them into heat.The purpose of this... 

With the considerable increase in academic publications and ever-growing concern for academic writing, academic literacy, and plagiarism in recent years, investigating academic writers’ ‘authorial identity’ and ‘authorial voice’ has been of utmost importance in academic milieu. The main purposes of this study were achieved by going through five main phases including 1) hypothesizing a model of authorial identity, 2) developing and validating a questionnaire based on the model, 3) testing the model based on the questionnaire data, 4) searching for possible significant difference in authorial identity of academic writers from three different fields of English, Biology, and Engineering, and 5)... 

Translation quality assessment (TQA) as a systematic field of inquiry has been under scholarly investigation over the past decades. In spite of the challenges appeared in the path to success, theoretical and practical developments have already been made in translation studies. One of the unsettled and challenging problems concerning translation assessment, yet, is the subjectivity that is inherent in the process of scoring test-takers’ translation performances. In the absence of any granular objective criteria which includes all the subcomponents of translation as a multi-layer rather than unitary construct, the raters inevitably bring their intuition and will to the act of measurement.... 

The present study aims at examining interval scaling and magnitude estimation in grammaticality judgment tests in terms of reliability and validity. It also explores the probable impact of response formats on the participants’ performance. 30 Engineering students at Sharif university of Technology participated in this research. The instrument of the research is a grammaticality judgment test developed by Ellis (1990).Two computer-based programs were made in order to assess the two mentioned response formats in grammaticality judgment test. At the first phase of the study, the participants responded to the interval format and after an interval of one month, they attempted the second response... 

Recently XML has become a standard for data representation and the preferred method of encoding structured data for exchange over the Internet. Moreover it is frequently used as a logical format to store structured and semi-structured data in databases. In this research we focus on semantic modeling for XML data and we propose a model-driven approach for modeling and designing XML databases. In the approach data is modeled without considering representation and implementation details in a platform independent model.
We use Object-Role Modeling as the platform independent model. We specify a formal meta-model of this model in Alloy and we validate instance models by checking... 

A web-based system is designed and implemented at cira.civil.sharif.edu as a risk communication tool to incentivize the society to take seismic risk mitigation measures. Risk denotes the expected monetary and social losses herein. The objective of this system is to raise the awareness of two groups of audience, i.e., the general public and policymakers,about the significant seismic risk in Iran. To address the general public, the system employs the notion of risk perception to put the results of sophisticated earthquake engineering risk analyses into perspective. The system also treats the epistemic uncertainty in the user input due to general public’s lack of technical knowledge through the... 

In this work solid circulation pattern in 2-D gas-solid fluidized beds has been investigated carefully. In this regard TFM approach was used. In addition KTGF was applied along with Gidaspow drag model. A commercial CFD software (ANSYS FLUENT 15.0) was used to simulate the hydrodynamics of the bed. Effects of a number of operating and design parameters on the solid circulation pattern were examined in detail. These parameters were gas velocity, restitution coefficient, pressure, solid density, temperature and vertical plates. The simulation results were validated against experimental data reported in the literature. Furthermore, the solid vertical velocity was investigated carefully