Sharif Digital Repository

Fuel cells belong to an avant-garde technology family for a wide variety of applications including micro-power, transportation power, stationary power for buildings and other distributed generation applications. The first objective of this contribution is to find a suitable reduced model of a Solid Oxide Fuel Cell (SOFC). The derived reduced model is then used to design a state estimator. In the first step, the distributed model of the SOFC that is derived using the first principle balance equations is solved by the method of lines. Since this model is too complex and sluggish for real-time applications, a representation of this model with lower number of states and good accuracy is needed.... 

There are a lot of parameters which are decisive in distribution loss management, such as demand value, energy price, etc. In this paper the cause-and-effect relationships among some of these variables are clearly described. The study demonstrates how a variable in the model will change, if an alteration in one of the other variables occurs. The power system variables considered in this study include energy and loss prices, generation and demand values, distribution loss, distribution system age, number of customers connected to the smart grid, distribution network revenue, and so forth. The smart grid impacts can be studied from two different aspects: 1) the communication infrastructure... 

In this paper, a 2D shuffle-exchange based mesh topology, or 2D SEM (Shuffle-exchange Mesh) for short, is presented for network-on-chips. The proposed two-dimensional topology applies the conventional well-known shuffle-exchange structure in each row and each column of the network. Compared to an equal sized mesh which is the most common topology in on-chip networks, the proposed shuffle-exchange based mesh network has smaller diameter but for an equal cost. Simulation results show that the 2D SEM effectively reduces the power consumption and improves performance metrics of the on-chip networks with regard to the conventional mesh topology. ©2008 IEEE  

In this paper, a framework for distributed and decentralized state estimation in high-pressure and long-distance gas transmission networks (GTNs) is proposed. The non-isothermal model of the plant including mass, momentum and energy balance equations are used to simulate the dynamic behavior. Due to several disadvantages of implementing a centralized Kalman filter for large-scale systems, the continuous/discrete form of extended Kalman filter for distributed and decentralized estimation (DDE) has been extended for these systems. Accordingly, the global model is decomposed into several subsystems, called local models. Some heuristic rules are suggested for system decomposition in gas pipeline... 

In this paper, a new method is proposed for modal parameter estimation using time-frequency representations. Smoothed Pseudo Wigner-Ville distribution which is a member of the Cohen's class distributions is used to decouple vibration modes completely in order to study each mode separately. This distribution reduces cross-terms which are troublesome in Wigner-Ville distribution and retains the resolution as well. The method was applied to highly damped systems, and results were superior to those obtained via other conventional methods. © 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved  

In this paper, a non-isothermal model of natural gas in pipelines including mass, momentum and energy balance equations are used as model equations for modeling and state estimation in gas pipeline systems. It is shown that differential equations describing the dynamic behavior of a high-pressure and long-distance gas transmission network (GTN) can be solved efficiently using the orthogonal collocation method. The issues corresponding to the presence of discontinuities in the dynamic model is substantially discussed and studied. The non-isothermal model of a GTN can experience discontinuities during transient operations, which causes challenges in simulation and state estimation in this... 

This paper aims to develop a boundary control solution for complicated gantry crane coupled motions. In addition to the large angle sway motion, the crane cable has a flexural transverse vibration. The Hamilton principle has been utilized to derive the governing partial differential equations of motion. The control objectives which are sought include: moving the payload to the desired position; reducing the payload swing with large sway angle; and finally suppressing the cable transverse vibrations in the presence of boundary disturbances simultaneously. These simultaneous boundary control objectives make the problem challenging. The proposed control approach is based on the original... 

A Piezoelectric Energy Harvester (PEH) of cantilever beam type is developed to optimize the generated power by means of active control of moment of inertia of the beam. Distributed parameter equations of vibration of the beam are developed. Then the electromechanical response of the piezoelectric actuator is discussed. The harvester configuration is then described and it is shown that such a configuration can avoid the drastic power drop in presence of uncertainty around resonance frequency by applying voltage to the piezoelectric actuator. Finally the proposed harvester output power working frequency span is compared to conventional methods to show that the significant performance... 

In this work, the wind farm layout optimization problem is dealt with using a new approach. The aim of wind farm layout optimization is to maximize the output power of a wind farm considering the wake losses. Layout optimization minimizes the wake losses regarding the location of the turbines. Three different wind scenarios with different wind direction angles, wind direction blowing probabilities, and Weibull distribution parameters are assumed. Since, the problem is nonlinear and constrained, imperialist competitive algorithm is used as a modern and powerful algorithm for continuous optimization problems. The optimization outcomes indicate that imperialist competitive algorithm yields... 

A 2-D numerical model was developed to predict the shape of weld pool in stationary GTA welding of commercial pure aluminium, without considering fluid flow in the weld pool. A Gaussian current density and heat input distribution on the surface of the workpiece were considered. The parameters of Gaussian distribution were modified by comparing calculated results with experimental ones. It was found that these distribution parameters are functions of applied current and arc length. Effects of arc length, applied current and welding time on the geometry of the weld pool were investigated. To check the validity of the model, a series of experiments were also conducted. In general, the agreement... 

Today modern computing systems leverage distributed models such as cloud, grid, etc. One of the obstacles of wide spreading these distributed computing models is security challenges which includes access control problem. These computing models because of providing features like on-demand self-service, ubiquitous network access, rapid elasticity and scalability, having dynamic infrastructure and offering measured service, need a powerful and continuous control over access and usage session. Usage control (UCON) model is emerged to cover some drawbacks of traditional access control models with features like attribute mutability and continuity of control. Several recent works have been done to... 

Size and number of data centers are fast growing all over the world and their increasing total power consumption is a worldwide concern. Moreover, increase in the amount of process variation in nanometer technologies and its effect on total power consumption of servers has made it inevitable to move toward variation-aware power reduction strategies. This paper formulates a variation-aware joint server placement and task assignment method using Integer Linear Programming (ILP) to minimize total power consumption of data centers. We first determine the optimum placement of servers in the data center racks based on total power consumption of each server and the data center recirculation model... 

An efficient gradient-based method to solve the volume constrained topology optimization problems is presented. Each iterate of this algorithm is obtained by the projection of a Barzilai-Borwein step onto the feasible set con- sisting of box and one linear constraints (volume constraint). To ensure the global convergence, an adaptive nonmonotone line search is performed along the direction that is given by the current and projection point. The adaptive cyclic reuse of the Barzilai-Borwein step is applied as the initial stepsize. The minimum memory requirement, the guaranteed convergence property, and al- most only one function and gradient evaluations per iteration make this new method very... 

In this study, we have utilized 3-D micro-tomography images of real and synthetic rocks to introduce two mathematical correlations which estimate the distribution parameters of 3-D coordination number using a single 2-D cross-sectional image. By applying a watershed segmentation algorithm, it is found that the distribution of 3-D coordination number is acceptably predictable by statistical analysis of the network extracted from 2-D images. In this study, we have utilized 25 volumetric images of rocks in order to propose two mathematical formulas. These formulas aim to approximate the average and standard deviation of coordination number in 3-D pore networks. Then, the formulas are applied... 

As an integral part of a hybrid control system for Pressure Swing Adsorption (PSA) processes, a dynamical hybrid observer is proposed for online reconstruction of the active mode and continuous states of these processes. Hybrid systems feature both continuous and discrete-event dynamics and hence are very suited to describe PSA processes. For estimation of the active mode, a mode observer is designed, and the continuous spatial profiles in each mode are estimated by distributed and decentralized Kalman filters. The proposed hybrid observer has been applied, in silico, for a two-bed, six-step PSA process used for Hydrogen purification. The active mode of the process along with the continuous... 

In this paper, we study the effects of anomalies on the distribution of TCP flow interarrival time process. We show empirically that despite the variety of data networks in size, number of users, applications, and load, the interarrival times of normal flows comply with the Weibull distribution, whereas specific irregularities (anomalies) causes deviations from the distribution. We first estimate the scale and shape parameters and then check the discrepancy of the data from a Weibull distribution with the estimated parameters. We also utilize the Weibull counting model to recheck the conformance of small flow interarrival times with the distribution. We perform our experiments on a diverse... 

Rhythmic activities such as swimming stroke in the human body are learnable through conscious trainings. Inspiringly, the main objective of this study is to develop a control framework to reproduce the described functionality in the imitating robots. To do so, a two layer supervisory controller is proposed. The high-level controller, which acts as the conscious controller during trainings, is a supervisory dynamic-based controller and uses all system sensory data to generate stable rhythmic movements. On the other hand, the low-level controller in this structure is a distributed trajectory-based controller network. Each node in this network is an oscillatory dynamical system which has the... 

OTIS-based architectures appear to have the potential to be an interesting option for future generations of multiprocessing systems. In this paper, we propose a new adaptive unicast routing algorithm and four software-based (unicast-based) broadcast algorithms for the wormhole switched OTI S-hypercube. We then present an empirical performance evaluation of these algorithms in OTIS-hypercube for different topologies, message length and traffic loads. © 2008 IEEE