Sharif Digital Repository

Fossil fuel usage caused global warming and other environmental problems. Recently, biofuels are considered as an important alternative. However, the efficient usage of water and energy in their production may accelerate their diffusion. ETBE is a kind of oxidizing fuel additive that can be biologically produced from the ethanol reaction. High water and energy consumption in the production and separation process is still a challenge. In this work, the ETBE production from lignocellulosic feed are considered. Then, the effect of different parameters are investigated by performing sensitivity analysis. In the next step, the optimal pathway of water and energy use in the production of ETBE are... 

Due to the successful experience gained in the process intensification and implementation of Reactive Distillation and Divided Wall Column in industry, Reactive Divided Wall Column have also been considered as a further step in process intensification. One important research area in implementation of RDWCs is their control issue. In the present study, the dynamic simulation of reactive divided wall columns and their control were studied and the adaptive model predictive control was used for the control objectives. Aspen Dynamics software was used for simulation and MATLAB software was utilized for applying the control strategy. The advantage of the applied control method is the use of... 

Helium is a valuable substance that is widely used in industry and medicine because of its unique properties. Due to the increasing demand for helium in the global market, several helium extraction units have been launched in the world in recent years; Nevertheless, there is still a significant gap between projected global helium production capacity and demand. Today, natural gas is known as the main source of helium on the earth. The method of industrial extraction of helium from natural gas is cryogenic. Due to the low temperature of this process, relatively high power consumption is used to extract helium from natural gas. Therefore, the optimization of this process is of great... 

Helium is known as a strategic material due to its unique properties and applications in the development of advanced industries. Currently, natural gas is the only source from which helium can be produced economically. The United States, Qatar, Algeria, and Russia have the largest share of helium production, respectively. In this research, the process of helium extraction from natural gas and its liquefaction, independent of LNG production based on helium in South Pars gas of Iran, which is the largest helium reservoir in the world, were designed and simulated.In the helium liquefaction section, the speed and accuracy of the process simulation were improved by developing a home code based on... 

The existing continual learning methods are mainly focused on fully-supervised scenarios and are still not able to take advantage of unlabeled data available in the environment. Some recent works tried to investigate semi-supervised continual learning (SSCL) settings in which the unlabeled data are available, but it is only from the same distribution as the labeled data. This assumption is still not general enough for real-world applications and restricts the utilization of unsupervised data. In this work, we introduce Open-Set Semi-Supervised Continual Learning (OSSCL), a more realistic semi-supervised continual learning setting in which out-of-distribution (OoD) unlabeled samples in the... 

There are different technologies for supplying water from alternative sources that meet different needs. In relation to thermal technologies such as multi-effect distillation, the highest water quality is obtained, there is no limit on the concentration of the incoming water, and there is the least need for maintenance. On the other hand, thermal technologies consume higher energy than membrane technologies. In this process, the better the heat transfer, the number of steps can be increased, and this means the production of more distilled water for the same amount of thermal energy. The distilled water layer on the surface of the heat exchanger has a high thermal resistance compared to the... 

In this study, membrane distillation was used for desalination of high saline water. Recently, the synthesis of nanoparticles for the synthesis of membranes for membrane distillation has shown incredible improvement in the morphological properties, flux, and rejection. In this study, by incorporating UiO-66 functionalized with Palmitic acid into PVDF/PEG polymer solution we could improve membranes properties. Functionalization of UiO-66 with Palmitic acid was confirmed with FTIR, XRD, BET, SEM. In the membrane containing 3% Palmitic acid-UiO-66, the flux was increased by 46.5%, resulting in a flux of 12.6 LMH, and the salt rejection was improved from 99.5% to 99.9%. These results confirmed... 

Water desalination is one of the most important issues for human being. Water desalination is the whole process of removing salts from water. This process is widely used in urban, industrial, and commercial applications and its efficiency has been improved with the development of desalination industry. One of the new methods of water desalination is membrane distillation, in which water desalination is performed using an appropriate membrane. In this research work, the membrane distillation process of saline water has been modeled and simulated using Comsol Multisphysics software through simultaneously solving the governing equations of momentum, thermal energy and mass transfer. The model... 

Given the environmental benefits of natural gas (NG) in comparison to other fossil fuels and its potential contribution to the shift towards renewable energy, there is an anticipated rise in the demand for NG as an energy source in the coming years. This surge in demand has sparked a growing interest in the exploration and development of unconventional gas fields with low hydrocarbon content, which were previously considered economically unviable. Among these fields, those rich in nitrogen have garnered significant attention. However, the presence of high nitrogen content in NG poses notable challenges, including a decrease in calorific value and increased costs associated with... 

Question Answering (QA) systems have reached human-level accuracy; however, these systems are vulnerable to adversarial examples. Recently, adversarial attacks have been widely investigated in text classification. However, there have been few research efforts on this topic in QA systems. In this thesis our approach is improving the robustness of QA systems using deep neural networks. In this thesis, as the first proposed approach, the knowledge distillation method is introduced to create a student model to improve the robustness of QA systems. In this regard, the pre-trained BERT model was used as a teacher, and its impact on the robustness of the student models on the Adversarial SQuAD...