Sharif Digital Repository

Demand response (DR) as a state-of-the-art program is accommodated in the energy efficiency contexts of the smart grid. Lack of the customer knowledge about how to respond to the time-differentiated tariffs and offered controlling signals is the major obstacle in the way of broad DR implementing. As a solution, an optimization method, namely load control (LC), is proposed to automatically control the on/off status of the responsive appliances in a smart home. This paper focuses on the direct load control (DLC) program in the category of incentive-based DR programs. LC is extended to consider inconvenience cost of the DLC implementation for DLC program participants. Outputs of the extended LC... 

A massive focus has recently been made on demand response (DR) programs, aimed to the electricity price reduction, reliability improvement, and energy efficiency. Basically, DR programs are divided into twofold main categories, namely incentive-based programs and price- or time-based programs. The focus of this paper is on priced-based DR programs including consumer responses to the time differentiated pricing. Home load management (HLM) program is designed to control responsive appliances and charging/discharging cycles of plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs) by the consumer. Uncertain parameters associated with PHEV, i.e. its departure/travelling time and energy consumption as well as... 

The graphics processing unit (GPU) is the most promising candidate platform for achieving faster improvements in peak processing speed, low latency and high performance. The highly programmable and multithreaded nature of GPUs makes them a remarkable candidate for general purpose computing. However, supporting non-graphics computing on graphics processors requires addressing several architectural challenges. In this paper, we focus on improving performance by better hiding long waiting time for transferring data from the slow global memory. Furthermore, we show that the proposed method can reduce power and energy. Reduction in access time to off-chip data has a noticeable role in reducing... 

A new strategy for enhancing the efficiency of TiO2 dye-sensitized solar cells (DSSCs) by design of a new double-layer film doped with Zn ions, with various morphologies and phase compositions, is reported. X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) revealed that Zn2+ (in the range 0.25-0.1 at.%) was successfully incorporated into the TiO2 lattice without forming secondary phases. X-ray diffraction (XRD) and field emission scanning electron microscope (FE-SEM) analyses showed that the synthesized nanoparticles had nanometer grains with different phase compositions and average crystallite sizes in the range of 8-48 nm, depending upon Zn atomic percentage. UV-vis absorption verified that Zn... 

The use of solar collectors in combination with heat pipes is rapidly growing in recent years. Heat pipes, as heat transfer components, have undeniable advantages in comparison with other alternatives. The most important advantage is their high rate of heat transfer at minor temperature differences. Although there have been numerous studies on the heat analysis or first thermodynamic analysis of flat plate solar collectors in combination with heat pipes, the exergy analysis of these collectors is needed to be investigated. In this work, energy and exergy analysis of a flat plate solar collector with a heat pipe is conducted theoretically. Next, the exergy efficiency of pulsating heat pipe... 

This paper describes the designing and evaluation of an alternative energy system which consists of PEMFC, PV, PEM electrolyser, methane reformer and hydrogen tank. In order to find out the minimum capacity of the components, a system sizing model is developed in MATLAB based on meteorological and electrical demand data. Three scenarios are considered based on different combinations of solar energy and fossil fuel energy as energy resources. The heating energy produced by the fuel cell is recovered for supplying domestic hot water while the system would supply electrical energy. Results show that system sizing strongly depends on scenarios and unit cost of electricity decreases through the... 

Bi-directional RSFQ benefits from using both positive and negative SFQ pulses to manipulate and transfer digital data. This allows more flexibility in the design of simpler circuits with enhanced performance. On the other hand, using the AC bias current, one can replace on-chip resistive current distributors with inductors. This resembles RQL logic, but in contrast to RQL, it is possible to use the well-established standard RSFQ cells in bi-directional RSFQ. These two advantages (energy-efficient computation and flexibility in design) make bi-directional RSFQ a powerful tool in next-generation supercomputers and also compatible with ultra-low-temperature quantum computers. In this work, to... 

Reliability and energy consumption are two of the main constraints in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). In this paper, a novel energy efficient and high speed error control scheme is introduced that is based on the Redundant Residue Number System (RRNS) allowing real-time application of WSNs. The proposed approach employs a new 3-moduli set {22n+1, 2 2n1-1, 2n- 1 } and an efficient reverse converter which relies on the Mixed Radix Conversion (MRC) algorithm and achieves significant improvements both in terms of conversion delay and hardware design. In order to obtain error controllability, two-redundant-moduli set 23n+1 - 1, 24n+1 - 1 is also added to the main 3-moduli set. The theoretical... 

In wireless body area networks (WBANs) it is necessary to devise an energy-efficient MAC scheduling mechanism which is capable of meeting strict QoS requirements. In this paper, special characteristics of WBAN channels, namely, the slow fading, the periodicity of fading, and the correlation among the channels have been exploited to formulate the sensor scheduling problem as a partially observable Markov decision problem (POMDP). Specific algorithms based on value iteration and pruning have been proposed in order to reduce the computational burden associated with the corresponding POMDP. The proposed scheduling mechanism is compared against a TDMA scheduling for a three-sensor network, and an... 

In advanced combined-cycle power plants, significant improvements in the thermodynamic performance are mainly achieved by the development of more efficient gas-turbine systems. This paper evaluates the effect of selected decision variables in the steam system for optimization of Thermal Combined Cycle Gas Turbine (TCCGT) power plant using an iterative exergoeconomic. The design variables were the thermodynamic parameters that establish the configuration both of the steam and gas systems. The design data of an existing plant (Damavand power plant in Tehran-Iran) is used. Two different objective functions are proposed: one minimizes the total cost of production per unit of output, and the... 

Demand response (DR) as a state-of-the-art program is accommodated in the energy efficiency contexts of the smart grid. Lack of the customer knowledge about how to respond to the time-differentiated tariffs and offered controlling signals is the major obstacle in the way of broad DR implementing. As a solution, an optimization method, namely load control (LC), is proposed to automatically control the on/off status of the responsive appliances in a smart home. This paper focuses on the direct load control (DLC) program in the category of incentive-based DR programs. LC is extended to consider inconvenience cost of the DLC implementation for DLC program participants. Outputs of the extended LC... 

In the context of stationary power generation, fuel cell based systems are being predicted as a valuable option to tabernacle the thermodynamic cycle based power plants. In this paper, multi objective optimization approach is used to optimize the planer solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC) stacks performance using genetic algorithm technique. Multi objective optimization generates the most attractive operating conditions of a SOFC system. This allows performing the optimization of the system regarding to two different objectives. Two pairs of different objectives are considered in this paper as distinguished strategies. In the first strategy, minimization of the breakeven per-unit energy cost... 

Control input energy efficiency is an important issue which should be considered in designing any control system. Due to the importance of this subject, in the present paper fractional order control systems are studied in the viewpoint of control input energy efficiency. In this study, the divergent terms of the control input energy function of fractional order control systems are obtained. It is shown that these terms have a significant role in the amount of the energy injected to the plant by the controller. Finally, two examples are provided to demonstrate the usefulness of the presented results in the paper  

Recently, the tradeoff between low energy consumption and high fault-tolerance has attracted a lot of attention as a key issue in the design of real-time systems. Dynamic Voltage Scaling (DVS) is commonly employed as one of the most effective low energy techniques for real-time systems. It has been observed that the use of feedback-based methods can improve the effectiveness of DVS-enabled systems. In this paper, we have investigated reducing the energy consumption of fault-tolerant hard real-time systems using the feedback control theory. Our proposed method makes the system capable of selecting the proper frequency and voltage settings in order to reduce the energy consumption, while... 

A novel detection algorithm with an efficient VLSI architecture featuring efficient operation over infinite complex lattices is proposed. The proposed design results in the highest throughput, the lowest latency, and the lowest energy compared to the complex-domain VLSI implementations to date. The main innovations are a novel complex-domain means of expanding/visiting the intermediate nodes of the search tree on demand, rather than exhaustively, as well as a new distributed sorting scheme to keep track of the best candidates at each search phase. Its support of unbounded infinite lattice decoding distinguishes the present method from previous K-Best strategies and also allows its complexity... 

The prospects of the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) and for carbon income, up to and beyond 2012, in the industrial sectors of Iran and five other Asian countries are investigated. The attractiveness and suitability of each host country, the status of their industrial sectors (based on four post-2012 scenarios), and the post-2012 potential of the CDM (or similar carbon projects) in these sectors are all examined. A multi-criteria analysis of Iran, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, China, and India, based on seven sets of criteria (institutional, regulatory, economic, political, social, CDM experience, and energy production/consumption), is conducted, and the post-2012 potential carbon incomes... 

In this study, the prospects of energy efficiency potential, clean development mechanism (CDM) and carbon income up to and beyond 2012 are investigated in the petrochemical industries of Iran as a major oil-producing country. This paper is to address four questions of: (1) the GHGs emission in Iranian petrochemical complexes, (2) the most energy-consuming processes, (3) units with the highest energy efficiency potentials and (4) potentials of CDM or similar carbon projects based on post-2012 scenarios. The petrochemical processes are investigated in two categories of non-polymeric and polymeric productions. Based on capital expenditure, economic saving, simple payback period, CO2 equivalent... 

In this paper, we propose and study a context-aware leader selection algorithm within the concept of mobile clouds. We deploy a dedicated Cooperative Control Server (CCS) to assist and manage the process of leader selection more efficiently. The proposed algorithm collects data regarding instantaneous conditions of Mobile Terminals (MTs) and their radio environment; and then computes and assigns a rank to each MT. The ranks calculated based on a combination of different context-related parameters and corresponding weighting factors, allow selecting the leader. Furthermore, the energy efficiency and stability of the selected leaders is investigated for different parameter values through... 

In this paper we consider the content distribution to a set of mobile users interested in the same content. We use the concept of mobile clouds, which exploits cooperation between mobile terminals over the low-power short-range links. We propose, formulate and investigate the energy efficiency and delay of four realistic cooperative content delivery strategies. The derived results, through analysis of mathematical models and simulations, demonstrate around 65% to 95% energy saving gain in mobile cloud strategies compared to conventional multicasting. We also show that using mobile clouds, content distribution delay can be reduced for up to 85%  

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) consume energy for their sensing, computation, and communication. To extend the lifetime of the network, sensor nodes are equipped with energy storage devices. Recharging of their batteries is impossible in most applications. Therefore, energy consumption needs to be monitored and limited to extend the high performance operation of the network. In this network, the communication module consumes the highest amount of energy. This paper demonstrates that among several methods offered to reduce the energy consumption, data compression has the highest effect on the energy usage by reducing the number of bits to be broadcasted. To determine the energy efficiency of...