Sharif Digital Repository

Nowadays, transportation sector consumes about 27 percent of the whole energy in Iran. Therefore, after domestic and business sectors which consume about 40 percent of the whole energy, transportation is placed in the second rank. However, the financial value of transportation is of the highest importance. Moreover, having 55percent of gasoline product consumption transportation has been also ranked as the largest consumer of gasoline products. Gasoline consumption in transport showed an increase until 1979. During 1980-1981, it decreased slightly and from 1982 have had a permanent upward trend. Oil products consumption in transport sector in 1950 has been less than average 15 million... 

Taking into account the ever-increasing consumption of energy in the transportation sector in Iran, a supply chain model is here developed for gasoline as the main energy carrier. The model considers the satisfaction of demand as well as techno-economical constraints of all technologies while minimising the cost and the carbon footprint of the whole supply chain in order to reach sustainability in the Iranian transport sector. The model enables us to depict the optimal pathways from the wells to the end-users. The demand is here estimated using econometric approach in which the elasticity of gasoline price is the least and the GDP growth rate plays an active role. Six scenarios are defined... 

Analysis of multi dimensional interactions of flow of energy in passenger vehicle is a complex task that necessitates development and utilization of analytical tools. Development of analytical tools with high complexity is usually based on conclusions of many concepts and theories from different scientific disciplines. In this approach, Passenger vehicle is supposed to be organized in the form of a firm and appears in the market that oriented towards establishing an effective energy supply system which may be identified as delivering the product (person kilometer or tone kilometer) with minimum operation costs. To this end, an optimization model named power software founded on theory of firm... 

According to one survey on energy consumption in Iran, commercial and building sector consume more energy than any other economic sectors. For example, about 38% of total energy that consumed in year 2001 has been used for space heating. Insulation in external walls of buildings has an important role to reduce the environmental effects on indoor space condition. Therefore, always using insulation is an alternative to avoid from the energy loss. In this paper, the effects of the using of a proper insulation on the energy saving in Iranian buildings are studied. For this purpose, an integrative modelling is used for simulation of the energy consumption in buildings. It is shown that energy... 

To evaluate the propulsion system capabilities of a Flapping Micro Air Vehicle (FMAV), a new aeroelastic model of a typical flexible FMAV is developed, utilizing the Euler-Bernoulli torsion beam and quasi steady aerodynamic model. The new model accounts for all existing complex interactions between the mass, inertia, elastic properties, aerodynamic loading, flapping amplitude and frequency of the FMAV, as well as the effects of several geometric and design parameters. To validate the proposed theoretical model, a typical FMAV, as well as an instrumented test stand for the online measurement of forces, flapping angle and power consumption, has been constructed. The experimental results are... 

Installing smart meters to publish real-time electricity rates has been controversial while it might lead to privacy concerns. Dispatched rates include fine-grained data on aggregate electricity consumption in a zone and could potentially be used to infer a household's pattern of energy use or its occupancy. In this paper, we propose Blowfish privacy to protect the occupancy state of the houses connected to a smart grid. First, we introduce a Markov model of the relationship between electricity rate and electricity consumption. Next, we develop an algorithm that perturbs electricity rates before publishing them to ensure users' privacy. Last, the proposed algorithm is tested on data inspired... 

Two new designs of wind towers were tested side by side with a conventional wind tower in the city of Yazd, Iran. All the towers were of identical dimensions. The two new designs were one with wetted column, consisting of wetted curtains hung in the tower column, and the other one with wetted surfaces, consisting of wetted evaporative cooling pads mounted at its entrance. The air temperature leaving the wind towers with evaporative cooling provisions were much lower than the air temperature leaving the conventional design, and its relative humidity much higher. The air-flow rate was reduced slightly in these new towers. It was found that the wind tower with wetted column performs better with... 

There is an increasing interest and use of energy foundation worldwide. Full-scale tests, physical model tests at one Earth's gravity and at elevated gravity in a geotechnical centrifuge and numerical simulations have been widely reported in the literature. Almost all studies have focused on single energy piles (EPs) and pile groups subjected to symmetrical thermal loads, although it is not unusual to have energy pile groups stressed by non-symmetrical thermal loads. In this study, a series of non-symmetrical thermal loading centrifuge model tests were conducted in saturated soft clay (OCR = 1.7), which is much vulnerable to temperature changes. The tests aim to investigate the effects of... 

This research aims to optimize a multi-zone Air Handling Unit's (AHU) energy consumption by using a Non-linear Model Predictive Control (NMPC) approach. In this paper, Genetic Algorithm (GA) and Non-linear autoregressive network with exogenous inputs (NARX) have been utilized to design NMPC for a multi-zone AHU. The NMPC problem could be divided into two main sections: internal model and the optimizer. NARX serves as the controller's internal model to predict the building's thermal dynamics. GA is then used to solve the NMPC problem and find the optimal value of the control signals at each time step. The proposed NMPC jointly minimizes energy consumption of the AHU and the deviation from the... 

One of the primary factors affecting the amount of worldwide energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions is cooking. Solar cooking is an appropriate solution because it is both inexpensive and expandable. To illustrate modern advancements and the current status of solar cooking technology, this paper presents a review of recent experimental and analytical socioeconomic studies on solar cookers. The experimental studies have been divided into three categories based on different solar cooker structures: (i) box types, (ii) concentrating types, and (iii) panel types. Next, different designs are investigated according to their direct or indirect heat transfer modes and optional equipment for... 

Energy use in buildings contributes a large part in global energy demand. To reduce energy use in this group of consumers, specially in cold seasons, an automatic control technique is proposed. In this paper, a model predictive controller (MPC) is employed to minimize the boiler activation time. The method uses the building model and incorporates the weather forecast data to act on the actuator in an optimal fashion while treating the user comfort constraints. This technique, as a part, can be embedded into the building energy management system. The building model parameters are obtained via an online identification process using unscented kalman filter (UKF). This identification is... 

The Supply of sustainable freshwater has turned into a fundamental problem in numerous countries. The increment in population, the industrialization of the world, and variation in global warming temperatures lead to an increase in droughts, storms, and floods around the world. Therefore, the problems of water scarcity appear worldwide. Contrary to popular belief, the largest reserves of water are available in the air. Accordingly, several technologies have been developed for the production of drinking water from humid air in the research works. But, the critical problem is the high energy consumption in this equipment. Therefore, the issues of water-energy nexus are the particular subject in... 

The aim of this paper is developing a new hierarchical model to evaluate and rank the sawability (power consumption) of carbonate rock with the use of effective and major criteria, and simultaneously taking subjective judgments of decision makers into consideration. The proposed approach is based on the combination of Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process (FAHP) method with TOPSIS (Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution) methods. FAHP is used for determining the weights of the criteria by decision makers, and then rankings of carbonate rocks are determined by TOPSIS. The proposed method is applied for Iranian ornamental stone to evaluate the power consumption in rock... 

By simultaneously applying pinch technology and the exergoeconomic method to a complex process system, beneficial and energy-efficient measures are identified. The "three-link-model" exergoeconomic methodology optimizes the design and operability of a system. In this work, contrary to traditional exergoeconomic methods, a reversed method is used. The approach proposed for the optimization of such a complex system is to iteratively optimize subsystems. Since the reversed exergoeconomic method is used, assumptions considered by Tsatsaronis (based on four assumptions for calculating the cost-optimal exergetic efficiency and relative cost difference) are not applicable and new assumptions are to...