Sharif Digital Repository

Pulsed atmospheric glow plasma, sustained by corona discharge, was utilized to convert methane. Analysis by gas chromatography showed that hydrogen and C2-products are the main constituents of outlet mixture while C 2+-products with small concentrations were also detected. The chemical energy efficiency turned out to be about 9% for the best result obtained by this type of reactor. It has been shown that more improvement of energy efficiency is possible by increasing ' the pulse repetition rate  

Wheel wear is one of the major costs in railway tracks consisting of sharp curves. In this paper, wear behavior of S1002 profiles of wheels in the "Southern Line" of Iran's railway, which consists of a large number of distinct and/or consecutive sharp curves, is studied using the field data measuring technique. Based on wear behavior analysis of all wheels, an optimal wagon maintenance technique called the "first and second limits" is suggested to minimize the wagon's cost per traveled distance. The results show that: 1) A severe wheel flange wear occurs for all wheels in comparison to the wheel tread wear in normal tracks; 2) A wagon's detachment for repair of critical wheels on its four... 

This paper introduces a new framework included mathematical model and a new software package interfacing two powerful softwares (MATLAB and GAMS) for obtaining the optimal distributed generation (DG) capacity sizing and sitting investments with capability to simulate large distribution system planning. The proposed optimization model allows minimizing total system planning costs for DG investment, DG operation and maintenance, purchase of power by the distribution companies (DISCOs) from transmission companies (TRANSCOs) and system power losses. The proposed model provides not only the DG size and site but also the new market price as well. Three different cases depending on system... 

Maintenance costs in airlines change as time passes. As airplane ages, it needs more often and more expensive checks. Due to these growing expenses, airlines are getting more interested in cost analysis. Under financial pressure, they avoid buying new airplanes and try to maintain the old ones, but sometimes try to cut the maintenance costs by ignoring or delaying some checks. In other words, they are more disposed to spend small amount of money frequently through time, than to spend a great deal on a new airplane with low maintenance costs. Therefore, in such situations, the following questions raise that what solution is more efficient as we look dynamically to the system? For answering... 

Exergoeconomic Composite Curves (EECC) - a synergy of Exergoeconomic and Composite Curves of Pinch Analysis is a novel method and propounded for the first time in this Paper. This is the first attempt to represent investment and annual operating and maintenance costs in addition to Exergy in a graphical form similar to Composite Curves. In this Paper a simplified methodology that represents the Exergy of chemical units of a process in a graphical form and preliminary investment strategy is developed for use with the EECC. The object has therefore been to study the possibilities to save money in Northern Pulp and Paper Mill, an Iranian mill with a capacity of 600 tons/day  

This article introduces an architecture exploration tool to study and understand the tradeoffs of future processor systems using nonvolatile memory and help guide the design of the future. Energy efficiency serves as a critical factor in designing embedded systems. Furthermore, the growing dominance of energy harvesting systems (EHSs) in sensor-rich applications has eventuated an emerging trend in wearable-systems and IoT devices as an alternative to battery-powered embedded systems. In this article, researchers have presented CATNAP-Sim, a simulator for EHSs, with NVP and hybrid NVM-SRAM memory  

Despite complex fluctuations, missing data, and maintenance costs of detectors, traffic volume forecasting at intersections is still a challenge. Moreover, most existing forecasting methods consider an isolated intersection instead of multiple adjacent ones. By accurately forecasting the volume of short-term traffic, a low-cost method can be provided to solve the problems of congestion, delay, and breakdown of detectors in the road transport system. This paper outlines a novel hybrid method based on deep learning to estimate short-term traffic volume at three adjacent intersections. The gated recurrent unit (GRU) and long short-term memory (LSTM) bilayer network with wavelet transform (WL)... 

Security constrained Preventive Maintenance (PM) scheduling is addressed as a crucial issue especially coping with new challenges of smart grids. Under the smart grid environment, Demand Response Resources (DRRs) are considered as virtual power plants in energy policy decisions which affect the controllability of power system ranging from short-term to long-term. Here, DRRs are regarded as a virtual resource of capacity reserve acquisition. Furthermore, under new environment, multifarious objectives will be imposed to PM scheduling which can be replicated into a single objective problem via a weighted approach with consideration of arbitrary weighting coefficients. In this paper, a new... 

In the present work, a thermal modeling is conducted for optimal design of compact heat exchangers in order to minimize cost and entropy generation. In this regard, an εNTU method is applied for estimation of the heat exchanger pressure drop, as well as effectiveness. Fin pitch, fin height, fin offset length, cold stream flow length, no-flow length, and hot stream flow length are considered as six decision variables. Fast and elitist nondominated sorting genetic algorithm (i.e., nondominated sorting genetic algorithm II) is applied to minimize the entropy generation units and the total annual cost (sum of initial investment and operating and maintenance costs) simultaneously. The results for...