Sharif Digital Repository

The use of more efficient energy consuming devices, which are closely associated with reduction of environmental pollution, has gained significant interest in the recent decades. The reduction of drag coefficient also improves safety and durability of environmental structures subjected to high-velocity fluid flow, and causes the noise and vibration to decrease as well. This paper describes the efficiency improvement in energy management by means of reducing drag coefficient in a practical divergent tubular- truncated cone. Extensive numerical simulations with emphasis on the shape optimization study were performed in order to find minimum drag coefficient for both laminar and turbulent flows... 

This study presents a method for global estimation of joint velocities in robotic manipulators. The authors consider a non-minimal model of a robotic manipulator and design an adaptive observer capable of handling uncertainties in robot dynamics. Smoothness of the dynamics of the proposed observer allows its easy implementation in comparison with non-smooth observers. Dimension of the proposed observer is shown to be at least 3n where n stands for the manipulator's degrees of freedom. This number is less than the dimension of most existing globally convergent adaptive observers. Global asymptotic convergence of state estimates to their true values is achieved under no persistency of... 

We present a method for global estimation of joint velocities in robot manipulators. A non-minimal model of a robotic manipulator is used to design an adaptive observer capable of handling uncertainties in robot dynamics. Dimension of the proposed observer is shown to be at least 3n where n stands for the manipulator degrees of freedom. This number is less than the dimension of most of existing globally convergent adaptive observers. Global asymptotic convergence of system state estimates to their true values is achieved under no persistency of excitation condition. Smoothness of the dynamics of the proposed observer allows its easy implementation in comparison with non-smooth observers.... 

This paper introduces a new concept that we call smart transmission expansion planning (TEP) based on unconventional high surge impedance Loading (HSIL) line designs that will revolutionize power delivery. To date, these two areas (TEP and transmission line design) have been conducted separately. For TEP, planners use the electrical parameters of a few standard conventional line designs to study planning scenarios, and then, the final candidate line is constructed. In such a sequence, cost-effective scenarios often do not meet the technical criteria of load flow. This paper will demonstrate that this sequence can be overturned; namely, a transmission expansion planner can get optimal line... 

To investigate boiling heat transfer characteristics of nanofluids, transient quenching experiments of a high temperature silver sphere in water-based nanofluids with Ag and TiO2 nanoparticles were performed. A silver sphere with a diameter of 10 mm and an initial temperature of 700 °C was quenched in these nanofluids at a temperature of 90 °C. The results showed a considerable reduction in the quenching ability of nanofluids compared to that of pure water. The presence of nanoparticles in water caused the film boiling mode to vanish at lower temperatures depending on the mixture concentration. Calculated heat transfer rates in nanofluids were lower than those in pure water. In the quenching... 

A novel cascode configuration previously presented as a high output resistance load (Fujimori and Sugimoto, 1998) has been investigated and utilized for amplification to achieve higher gain and bandwidth by the authors (Lofti and Atarodi, Proc. ICEE'00, vol.1, pp.83-8, 2000). A low-voltage single-stage opamp using this configuration is designed. Finally, based on this idea a 1.5-V offset- and gain-compensated 5th order switched-capacitor low pass filter with only 150 μA current consumption in a 0.8 μm process is designed. © 2000 IEEE  

Memory-intensive workloads operate on massive amounts of data that cannot be captured by last-level caches (LLCs) of modern processors. Consequently, processors encounter frequent off-chip misses, and hence, lose significant performance potential. One of the components of a modern processor that has a prominent influence on the off-chip miss traffic is LLC's replacement policy. Existing processors employ a variation of least recently used (LRU) policy to determine the victim for replacement. Unfortunately, there is a large gap between what LRU offers and that of Belady's MIN, which is the optimal replacement policy. Belady's MIN requires selecting a victim with the longest reuse distance,... 

Memory-intensive workloads operate on massive amounts of data that cannot be captured by last-level caches (LLCs) of modern processors. Consequently, processors encounter frequent off-chip misses, and hence, lose significant performance potential. One of the components of a modern processor that has a prominent influence on the off-chip miss traffic is LLC's replacement policy. Existing processors employ a variation of least recently used (LRU) policy to determine the victim for replacement. Unfortunately, there is a large gap between what LRU offers and that of Belady's MIN, which is the optimal replacement policy. Belady's MIN requires selecting a victim with the longest reuse distance,... 

Various mixtures of surfactants and nanosilica particles were investigated to assess their influence on rising bubble hydrodynamics. For this purpose, local velocities of rising bubbles were measured experimentally. Also, the effects of concentration of three types of surface-modified silica nanoparticles on density, viscosity, and surface tension of surfactant solutions were determined. Experimental results revealed that the simultaneous presence of nanoparticles and surfactant molecules led to the decrease of local velocities of rising bubbles. The presence of nanoparticles in surfactant solutions leads to a more reduction of bubble local velocity. This could be caused by the formation of... 

Automatic image annotation is a mechanism to assign a list of appropriate tags that describe the visual content of a given image. Most methods only focus on the content of the images and ignore the relationship between the tags in vocabulary. In this work, we propose a new deep learning-based automatic image annotation architecture, which considers label dependencies in a graph convolution neural network structure and extracts tag descriptors to re-weight the output class scores based on their relationships. The proposed architecture has three main parts: feature extraction, graph convolutional network, and annotation. In graph convolutional network, we apply one layer convolution on... 

This work presents the results of numerical simulation of liquid flow on a static bubble. Velocity and surfactant concentration profiles of the liquid around a bubble exposed in flow field were estimated via unsteady CFD solution. Governing equations are the Navier-Stokes and conservation of mass in the liquid bulk and at the interface. Resulted profiles of surfactant concentration and velocity in the liquid bulk are used to determine the dynamic surface tension data via two adsorption isotherms of Langmuir and Frumkin. Data of dynamic surface tension were validated via experimental data of “bubble in flow field” protocol. Surface concentrations of surfactants were also numerically... 

Local velocities and aspect ratios of rising bubbles were measured to investigate the effects of bubble detachment shape on rising bubble hydrodynamics. Two types of capillary were employed to generate bubbles of identical volume: one glassy nozzle aligned vertically and the other stainless steel needle aligned horizontally. Horizontally injected bubbles have a spherical initial shape, and their values of aspect ratio slightly fluctuate around unity. However, vertically injected bubbles have a surface-stretched initial shape, and their values of aspect ratios decrease sharply from 1.1 to 0.65. There is a notable correspondence between the variation of local velocities and aspect ratios that... 

Stepped planing hulls enable the feasibility of running at relatively low Drag-Lift ratio by means of achieving more optimal trim angle at high speeds. Currently, there is no precise method to analyze these hulls over the full range of operating speeds. In this study, a three-dimensional computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model using volume of fluid (VOF) approach is presented for examining the characteristics of a planing hull having one transverse step. A procedure is presented to transform a series of fixed-position simulations into a free to heave and pitch simulation. Resistance, lift, running draft, dynamic trim angle, and wetted area are compared with available experimental data and... 

Forced convective of a nanofluid that consists of water and Al2O3 in horizontal tubes has been studied numerically. Computed results were validated with existing well established correlation. Two-phase Eulerian model has been implemented for the first time to study such a flow field. A single-phase model and two-phase mixture model formulations were also used for comparison. The comparison of calculated results with experimental values shows that the mixture model is more precise. It is illustrated that the single-phase model and the two-phase Eulerian model underestimates the Nusselt number. Effects of nanoparticles concentration on the thermal parameters are also discussed  

Zn/Ni nanocrystalline multilayer coatings were electrodeposited using single bath method and switching current densities. Effect of deposition current densities (i1 and i2) and number of layers (n) on composition, surface morphology and roughness, microhardness, phase structure and corrosion resistance of Zn/Ni multilayers were studied and compared with that of single layer. Analyzing and optimizing the influences of mentioned parameters on corrosion resistance of multilayers carried out through Response Surface Methodology. The model based on RSM results demonstrated that improvement in corrosion resistance due to increase in “difference of deposition current densities” was more effective... 

Obtaining a deep knowledge about the bubbly flow systems, which are widely applied in various chemical and industrial processes, is crucial for scholars and engineers to achieve more accurate equipment design and processes control. This paper is dedicated to experimentally investigate the distinctly and concurrently effects of fumed silica nanoparticles (NPs) and hexane vapor molecules as impurities in continuous and discrete phases, respectively, on the terminal velocity and drag coefficient of a single rising bubble in aqueous solutions. The obtained experimental data were compared to the calculated data by derived correlations in literatures. As a result, none of those can predict the... 

Solid-State Drives (SSDs) are recently employed in enterprise servers and high-end storage systems in order to enhance performance of storage subsystem. Although employing high speed SSDs in the storage subsystems can significantly improve system performance, it comes with significant reliability threat for write operations upon power failures. In this paper, we present a comprehensive analysis investigating the impact of workload dependent parameters on the reliability of SSDs under power failure for variety of SSDs (from top manufacturers). To this end, we first develop a platform to perform two important features required for study: A) a realistic fault injection into the SSD in the... 

Chip multiprocessors (CMPs) require a low-latency interconnect fabric network-on-chip (NoC) to minimize processor stall time on instruction and data accesses that are serviced by the last-level cache (LLC). While packet-switched mesh interconnects sacrifice performance of many-core processors due to NoC-induced delays, existing circuit-switched interconnects do not offer lower network delays as they cannot hide the time it takes to set up a circuit. To address this problem, this work introduces CIMA - a hybrid circuit-switched and packet-switched mesh-based interconnection network that affords low LLC access delays at a small area cost. CIMA uses virtual cut-through (VCT) switching for short... 

Server workloads benefit from execution on many-core processors due to their massive request-level parallelism. A key characteristic of server workloads is the large instruction footprints. While a shared last-level cache (LLC) captures the footprints, it necessitates a low-latency network-on-chip (NOC) to minimize the core stall time on accesses serviced by the LLC. As strict quality-of-service requirements preclude the use of lean cores in server processors, we observe that even state-of-the-art single-cycle multi-hop NOCs are far from ideal because they impose significant NOC-induced delays on the LLC access latency, and diminish performance. Most of the NOC delay is due to per-hop... 

Real-time video transmission is considered as an important means for information distribution. One major application of it is E-learning, which requires real-time video processing and transmission. On the other hand, the process of cut detection is a fundamental component in automatic video browsing, indexing, searching, retrieval, and archiving. This paper introduces a new video cut detection technique that uses dominant lines and angles extracted from edge information of the video contents. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first works done for cut detection in E-learning application. This method is compatible with our application's requirements and has a low complexity and high...