Sharif Digital Repository

In this paper, we investigate the CO emission from an oil refinery gas incinerator both theoretically and experimentally. At the beginning of this research, our collected data from this incinerator showed that the CO contamination would be far exceeding the permissible environmental standards at the stack exhaust. Therefore, we decided to perform a combined theoretical-experimental study to find a reasonable solution to reduce the CO pollution suitably. Our theoretical study showed that a reliable solution would be to increase the incinerator operating temperature. However, we needed to collect some data from this incinerator to examine if our achieved analytical solution would work... 

The present study was conducted to investigate the impacts of retrofitted CNG vehicles on air pollutant emissions in Tehran over a 20 years period using available statistical data, precise automobile tests, data analysis, and LEAP Software. The obtained results revealed an increase in air pollutant emissions including CO (equal to 1030.77 thousand tons), NOx (equal to 1030.77 thousand tons), THC (269.02 thousand tons) and CO2 (equal to 38.43 thousand tons) resulting from utilizing retrofitted CNG vehicles within the studied period. Considering the obtained results, if the current trend of producing retrofitted CNG vehicles continues, a total cost of 435 million USD will impose on the... 

Recent progress in developing artificial neural network (ANN) metamodels has paved the way for reliable use of these models in the prediction of air pollutant concentrations in urban atmosphere. However, improvement of prediction performance, proper selection of input parameters and model architecture, and quantification of model uncertainties remain key challenges to their practical use. This study has three main objectives: to select an ensemble of input parameters for ANN metamodels consisting of meteorological variables that are predictable by conventional weather forecast models and variables that properly describe the complex nature of pollutant source conditions in a major city, to... 

In this study, PM10, PM2.5, and PM1 concentrations were measured from April through September 2010. These measurements were made every six days and on days with dust events using a Grimm Model 1.177 aerosol spectrometer. Meteorological data were also collected. Overall mean values of 319.6 ± 407.07, 69.5 ± 83.2, and 37.02 ± 34.9 μg/m3 were obtained for PM10, PM2.5, and PM1, respectively, with corresponding maximum values of 5337.6, 910.9, and 495 μg/m3. The presence of the westerly prevailing wind implied that Iraq is the major source of dust events in this area. A total of 72 dust days and 711 dust hours occurred in the study area. The dust events occurred primarily during July. The longest... 

In the recent researches HVAC with a based desiccant dehumidifier with a low ambient impact is more efficient in comparison to the traditional systems. Hybrid desiccant cooling systems can be used to control indoor air quality in buildings. This paper presents an integrated energy, entropy and exergy analysis of a hybrid desiccant cooling system compare to a compression system based on first and second laws of thermodynamic. The main objective is the use of a method called exergy costing applied to a conventional compression system that has been chosen to provide the proper conditioned air for a building in hot and humid condition. By applying the same method for the equivalent hybrid... 

This study examines the air quality on line 1 and 2 of Tehran underground metro. The total suspended particulate (TSP), PM10, PM2.5, PM1, CO2, NO, NO2, SO2, relative humidity and air temperature were measured. An integrated air quality index was also calculated for each location. The results revealed that, PMlO, PM2.5, and SO2 concentrations are higher than their environmental standard levels. The in station CO2 levels are higher while its' in train levels are lower than environmental permissible level. The air quality index showed that the in-train air quality is more acceptable than the instation air quality  

Industrial air pollution from point and nonpoint sources of steel complexes has drawn increasingly more public attention in the past decades. Previous research efforts have been more concentrated on point sources of particulate emissions from these complexes. However, wind-induced particulate emissions from iron ore storage piles not only result in ambient air pollution but also increase economic adverse effects to the industry by loss of process raw materials. Experiments were conducted to assess the impact of wind speed and humidity on particulate emission rates from iron ore storage piles. A wind-generating system and specific iron ore, experimental piles (L:W:H of 30:11.5:5 cm) were... 

In the recent decades, cleanrooms have found growing applications in broad range of industries such as pharmacy and microelectronics. Concerns about negative effects of the contaminant exposure on the human health and product quality motivate many researchers towards understanding of the airflow and contaminant distribution though these environments. With an improvement in computational capacity of the computers, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) technique has become a powerful tool to study the engineering problems including indoor air quality (IAQ). In this research, indoor airflow in a full-scale cleanroom is investigated numerically using Eulerian-Eulerian approach. To evaluate the... 

Urban air quality is a major concern throughout the world. The concentration of human activities in a relatively small area puts enormous pressure on urban systems and has led to numerous environmental problems which have created major problems for urban air quality management. The complex nature of air pollution, especially with respect to health impacts in urban areas, has prompted attempts to define the so-called indicators that condense and simplify the available monitoring data to make them suitable for public reporting and decision makers. Several concepts and indicators exist to measure and rank urban areas in terms of their infrastructural, socioeconomic and environment-related... 

In the present work, we investigated the characteristics of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) and metal(loid)s in indoor/outdoor PM10, PM2.5, and PM1 in a retirement home and a school dormitory in Tehran from May 2012 to May 2013. The results indicated that the annual levels of indoor and outdoor PM10 and PM2.5 were much higher than the guidelines issued by the World Health Organization (WHO). The most abundant detected metal(loid)s in PM were Si, Fe, Zn, Al, and Pb. We found higher percentages of metal(loid)s in smaller size fractions of PM. Additionally, the results showed that the total PAHs (ΣPAHs) bound to PM were... 

This research proposes a new method for optimisation of a power generation system based on exergy fuel cost and external social cost of air pollution. A thermodynamic model is provided to estimate the outlet mass flow rates of CO2, CO, NO and NO2 for a gas turbine based on maximising the first and second law efficiencies and minimising the objective function. Results show that inclusion of the external social cost of air pollution increases the optimum excess air ratio if temperature constraint due to metallurgical consideration is disregarded. Otherwise external social cost of air pollution is independent of optimised conditions  

The increase of pollution and the expansion of industrial, agricultural wastewater and urban runoff discharges in water sources have intensified the concentration of water pollutants. Considering that in Iran as in other countries the major part of drinking water is obtained from surface waters and due to the importance of disinfection, chlorination is doubtlessly the optimum and most common water treatment method used. However this method produces chlorination by-products (CBPs). Trihalomethanes(THMs) and Haloaceticacids (HAAs) are the main and most important groups of disinfection by-products (DBPs). Separation of THMs has gained a lot of breakthroughs since a lot of time elapses from its... 

Aerosol measurement is used in a variety of fields such as nanotechnology, materials science, pollution monitoring, air quality measurements, combustion and engine exhaust analysis, inhalation toxicology, and medical studies. One of the most prevalent methods for aerosol measurement is to use electrical mobility. An electrical mobility spectrometer (EMS) is used to measure aerosol particles size distribution ranging from 10-1000 nanometers, under the influence of an electric field. The accuracy of this distribution is influenced by flow conditions, the geometry of the EMS, the electric field, and the number of electrode rings. In this work, a multi-channel EMS is studied using computational... 

Forecasting is a challenging problem in highly nonlinear dynamic systems. The main goal in development of forecasting models in complex systems is to produce a model that can accurately behave similar to the main system. In problems such as air pollution forecasting, the presence of uncertainties and nonlinearities affects the model's precision. In this paper, ozone concentration, which is well-known as an index for air pollution is forecasted using neuro-fuzzy models. Causal variables are integrated in the models in order to enhance the model's performance. The results are compared to a fuzzy logic approach to demonstrate reliability and accuracy of the proposed model using real observed... 

Land use regression (LUR) has not been applied thus far to ambient alkylbenzenes in highly polluted megacities. We advanced LUR models for benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene, p-xylene, m-xylene, o-xylene (BTEX), and total BTEX using measurement based estimates of annual means at 179 sites in Tehran megacity, Iran. Overall, 520 predictors were evaluated, such as The Weather Research and Forecasting Model meteorology predictions, emission inventory, and several new others. The final models with R2 values ranging from 0.64 for p-xylene to 0.70 for benzene were mainly driven by traffic-related variables but the proximity to sewage treatment plants was present in all models indicating a major local... 

(Lanthanum, Cerium)(Iron, Manganese, Cobalt, Palladium)(Oxygen)3- Perovskite catalyst was prepared by the citrate route and deposited on ceramic monoliths via dip coating procedure. The catalyst was applied on a car with XU7 motors and the amount of emission was monitored with vehicle emission test systems in Sapco company. The results were compared with the imported catalyst with noble metals such as palladium, platinum and rhodium by Iran Khodro company based on the Euro III standards. The catalysts were characterized by specific surface area measurements, scanning electron microscopy, X-ray diffraction, line scan and map. In the results, obtained in the home made sample, the amount of... 

The spatiotemporal variability of ambient volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in Tehran, Iran, is not well understood. Here we present the design, methods, and results of the Tehran Study of Exposure Prediction for Environmental Health Research (Tehran SEPEHR) on ambient concentrations of benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene, p-xylene, m-xylene, o-xylene (BTEX), and total BTEX. To date, this is the largest study of its kind in a low- and middle-income country and one of the largest globally. We measured BTEX concentrations at five reference sites and 174 distributed sites identified by a cluster analytic method. Samples were taken over 25 consecutive 2-weeks at five reference sites (to be used for...