Sharif Digital Repository

Power transformer is one of the most important equipment in the power system which plays a key role in the reliability and quality of power delivery. Among numerous failure modes of a typical power transformer, the turn-to-turn fault (TTF) is one of the most prominent reasons for its unplanned outage. A turn-to-turn fault quite often begins with the degradation of the winding insulation between two adjacent turns, then in a short time, this low-level fault can progress to a large number of turns and results in the transformer costly damages. Therefore, it is vital to detect TTF at an early stage and prevent its progression to a catastrophic disaster. The conventional percentage differential... 

Distributed embedded systems are widely used in safety-critical applications, such as avionics platform and flight control system. Faults in such applications may cause catastrophic effect. Therefore, these systems must be fault-tolerant and must be designed not only to detect faults but also to recover from faults. Fault tolerance is normally realized on multi-processor system via temporal duplication (time-redundancy) or spatial duplication (hardware-redundancy) depending on the availability of the slack time. Slack time is defined as the difference between the deadline and execution time. Duplication is a common technique to achieve fault tolerance in safety-critical applications, but may... 

Lean Management is a set of modern procedures that uplifted Japanese manufacturers' status in global markets. The core principle of lean management is to eliminate every process or operation which creates no value, directly and indirectly. To this day, lean has been more focused on production. But eliminating the wastes in service organizations in crucial, due to nature of service. In this thesis, first the lean concept and the Middle East bank is discussed and a literature review on lean studies is presented. Then a vision for the future is envisioned and a questionnaire for conducting a Corporate Diagnosis is developed. In the next step, a lean management system for the bank is implemented... 

One of the most essential part of power system are transmission lines. Transmission of power from production centers to consumption centers is duty of these lines. Any disturbance in this duty make great losses to producers and consumers. One of the most disturbance in transmission lines are short circuits that occurred because of various causes. Most faults on transmission lines occurred in stormy weather that make more troubles for fault search. So we need a tool that can find location of fault precisely and quickly. This tool named fault locator. There are many algorithms for fault location and detection on power system transmission lines. These algorithms usually are dependent on very... 

In continous chemical process, disturbances usually propagate along the process. This project describes a data-driven method for identifying the direction of propagation of disturbances using historical process data. The concept is the application of Transfer Entropy, a method based on the conditional probability density functions that measures directionality of variation. For demonstration purposes the transfer entropy method is used to isolate the root-cause of the disturbance in the Tennassee Eastman benchmark process  

The three-phase Dual Active Bridge DC-DC converter, by virtue of its various advantages, has been widely used in numerous industrial and sensitive applications. However, this converter includes a large number of power switching devices, which are the most fragile components in Power Electronics, and therefore, can pose a threat to appropriateness of the converter for such applications. Accordingly, introducing a fault-tolerant scheme for this converter is necessary, in order to meet the demands of high reliability and service continuity in aforementioned applications. In this thesis, firstly, the converter is studied during normal operation as well as under switch open-circuit fault, and the... 

AC/DC/AC converters are widely being used in a variety of power applications. Continuity of service of these systems, as well as their reliability and performance are now of the major concerns. Indeed, the failure of the converter can lead to the total or partial loss of the control of the phase currents and can cause serious system malfunction or even shutdown. Thus, uncompensated faults can quickly endanger the system. Therefore, to prevent the spread of the fault to the other system components and to ensure continuity of service, fault tolerant converter topologies associated with quick and effective fault detection and compensation methods must be implemented. In this thesis, the... 

Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) is a set of various physiological sensors for remote monitoring and controlling of the patient’s health status. Detection of anomalies, containing faults and physiological stresses, and distinguishing between them can eliminate the need for constant presence of specialists and decrease the occurrence of False Alarm Rate (FAR).A supervisory hardware platform for WBAN architecture is introduced and implemented in this thesis. The proposed architecture contains three sensors for recording of biomedical signals, heart rate, SpO2 and body temperature simultaneously and transmitting them to central node wirelessly through Wi-Fi standard. This proposed architecture... 

Condition monitoring and fault detection is an important way to provide economy in both time and costs. Many methods are developed for this purpose. Vibration analysis is one of the most important ways in this field. In this thesis, fault detection of mechanical rotary systems with nonlinear and non-stationary nature has been developed by use of empirical mode decomposition (EMD) and Hilbert transform. Firstly the measured signal is transformed into some intrinsic mode functions (IMF’s) by EMD, and then the Hilbert transform is implemented on each IMF. With Hilbert transform, the instantaneous frequency of system and then the mean frequency are obtained. Mean frequency is a key definition... 

Fatigue crack growth can have harmful effects on the reliability rotary machine. While an early warning to crack, can be used to extend the life of these expensive machines and increase reliability.Structural Vibration Condition Monitoring as a primary fault detection method, achieved to a lot amazing result and for this reason studies vibration behavior of cracked rotational shaft is a big issue for engineers of dynamic machine.In this research, first check the fault detection methods based on structural vibration condition monitoring, mode shape methods were extracted. Then by modeling rotational shaft in computer and creation of crack on it, fault detection quality of these methods have... 

One of the common problems in using high voltage network is the occurrence of partial electrical discharge in high voltage equipment such as cables. This problem may not be serious at first, but over time it can cause wear, corrosion, or reduction of equipment life, and eventually, if not prevented in a timely manner, can cause electrical sparks, larger problems, and possibly equipment and network become irreparable. On the one hand, due to very clear reasons, we need the voltage level to be high, and on the other hand, due to the application of high voltage level and the need to optimally design the insulation system to reduce their dimensions and construction costs, there will be the... 

The present thesis is concerned with design and development of automated irrigation system pilot. This system is obtained by equipping each regulating gate of irrigation network with a controlling hardware. This hardware is designed and developed in this project for Iran’s regulating gate, which are either slide gate or radial gate. This hardware consists of a) Ultrasonic sensor for measure gate upstream water level, b) Wireless modem for exchanging measurements between automated gates, c) controller, d) Electric motor and driver, e) shaft encoder and f) adaptor. The satisfactory performance of this hardware is shown via several experiments on the pilot  

The accurate fault diagnosing system design helps the process safety and also helps increasing the products quality of the process. In this project, the fuzzy system and neural network have been used for fault detection and diagnosis of a yeast fermentation bioreactor. In one case, parameters of membership functions are selected in a conventional manner. In second case, the optimal values of these parameters have been obtained using the genetic algorithm. In another case, the neural network system is used for fault detection. These three cases are compared based on their performances in fault diagnosis of a yeast fermentation bioreactor for three different conditions. The results indicate... 

Lifetime extension would be a necessary preventive action to halt micro cracks expansion on the airplane external surface. To decide about whether to perform this operation, one should examine technological maturity, costs and technical parameters. Technical status in lifetime extension is one of the major drivers of this decision which should be considered in the first step of technology management process which is known as the technology attractiveness step. In this research, major technologies of rejuvenation is examined and categorized by the technology mapping. Also, key processes of rejuvenation and technological fields ranking has been determined by the procedural view tools of the... 

In this thesis the problem of optimal robust fault detection has been studied. Optimal Fault Detection Filter (FDF) design, by using a Linear Matrix Inequality (LMI) structure for both linear systems with polytopic uncertainties and nonlinear Lipschitz systems has been considered. In this regard, a novel LMI is introduced which is capable of calculating the maximum lower bound of H− index with great accuracy.Then, based on the parameter-dependent Lyapunov function and the property of having convexity in combination of certain state space equations, the result is extended to polytopic uncertain systems. Afterward the design of an optimal observer-based residual generator, in the sense of... 

This thesis proposes a dynamic model for studding influences of suspension components behavior on rail vehicle dynamics. As the air springs are very important isolating component in rail vehicles, a new complete nonlinear air spring model, with taking into consideration of thermo–dynamical effects, is developed. The model coefficients are tuned based on the real test data and it can be easily used in dynamic modeling of air springs. The new proposed vehicle model is a complete track–vehicle model with 70 degree of freedoms which is addressed as a modular type. Experimental results from complete rail–vehicle field test, showed remarkable agreement between proposed model and test results.... 

In this thesis, the problem of placing a minimum number of phasor measurement units (PMUs) in a transmission system is considered so that faults on all lines of the network can be diagnosed and located irrespective of their locations. For this purpose, a PMU placement algorithm is proposed to calculate the required data for impedance-based fault-location of any fault line in the network, achieving the full potential of the circuit laws throughout the system. Another algorithm is then proposed to compute the voltage and current values of the fault line for fault-location purposes. Moreover, as many networks are already equipped with PMUs, the proposed algorithm makes it possible to locate... 

Increasing in size and complexity of digital designs has made manufacturing process more complex and enforces more complexity in verification of designs. This makes it essential to address critical verification issues at the early stages of design cycle. Such a complicated designs needs to be tested for fabrication faults as well as functional faults. Several attempts have been made to raise the quality of testing methods with automatic test pattern generation (ATPG) and design for testability (DFT) methods in logic and lower levels. Although these techniques try to increase the testability of a circuit considerably, but there are always some overheads in area, power and performance.... 

Fault detection and identification is one of the major issues and challenges in the field of engineering and currently is considered as an active field of research. As the replacement of human in dangerous or inaccessible environments, robotic mechanical systems can be used which exposes to a variety of stresses and actions that causes faults in the actuators or sensors. Accordingly, detection of fault at the earliest possible time after the fault accurence and its identification such that real flaw waveform is being extracted, can prevent more damage to the system without any need to human immediate interference. Model based approach in recent decades has shown their ability to detection... 

Five-Level Active-Neutral-Point -Clamped (5L-ANPC) converter is used for medium-voltage and high-power applications. In many of these applications, availability and robustness against fault are the most important issues. On the other hand, this converter is made of a large number of power semiconductor switches, diodes and capacitors which could increase the failure probability. Thus, fault detection of power circuit elements is necessary for fault tolerant operation of the converter. In this thesis, following an introduction to the topology and operation principles of Five-Level Active Neutral point clamped converter, a novel open-circuit fault detection and localization method is...