Sharif Digital Repository

Groundwater beneath the cities is becoming an important and valuable resource. Conjunctive use of surface and groundwater is likely to become increasingly more common as urban population grows by time. Therefore, one important requirement for urban water management planning is forecasting the groundwater level fluctuations. Unfortunately less experience and information is available to evaluate the fluctuations of groundwater level in urban environment compare to the natural systems, also different processes (sources) are involved in an urban water cycle, which all together make it more complicated to study. Similar to many other megacities, there is a serious lack of hydrogeological and... 

The growing requirements for renewable energy production lead to the development of a new series of systems, including wave and tidal energy conversion systems. Due to their sensitivity and the impact of the aggressive marine environment, the selection of the most adequate location for these systems is a major and very important task. Several factors, such as technological limitations, environmental conditions, administrative and logistic conditions, have to be taken into account in order to support the decision for best location. The aim of the present study is to provide an Atlas of IRAN Offshore Renewable Energy Resources (hereafter called ‘the Atlas’) to map out wave and tidal resources... 

Nowadays because of population growth and limitation of fossil fuels for power generation purpose, utilization of renewable energy sources has become highlighted. According to the geographical situation for use of wind energy, since some areas of Iran are in suitable conditions the manufacture of wind turbines and installation in wind farms has been under development recently. Monitoring the performance and operation of turbines and wind farms is an inevitable matter. Because of the suitable geographical location of Iran and pursuant to fair wind potential sites widespread this country, this phenomenon requires some backgrounds in many aspects to be achieved. One of the most important... 

One of the important tools that we frequently use in life is the map. In every day movements we can use the maps in order to navigate and find our way. We also utilize the maps to find out more about our surrounding world. GIS is the key technology which can help us reach these goals. In GIS generally there are 2 methods for representing geographic data, these methods are Raster and Vector data representation. In this thesis our purpose is to find another way for representing GIS data by using vector format. In this new representation we can access to information which are not accessible in regular maps. So we generate a new flexible platform for GIS data. Thus in order to represent new... 

Groundwater resources in arid and semi-arid regions, which the most parts of them have not had enough surface water, is of great importance. Due to the paramount importance of these vital resources, many scholars have conducted various studies on groundwater contamination and, especially, on nitrate as the best indicator of groundwater contamination because of its ability to transport, its low absorption, and its durability in water. In this study, using qualitative methods, groundwater contamination of Mashhad aquifer was evaluated, and then in order to obtain better adjustment with urban areas, these methods were modified which resulted in better correlation with measured nitrat. Based on... 

To reduce construction costs selecting the optimal route for water conveyance line entails ample observation and considering all effective parameters. Some part of Aidoghmoush dam project of water conveyance line located in Azerbijan the east has been investigated in this research. First, by investigating, effective factors in determining the optimal route have been identified and then categorized into two groups of quantitative criteria(technical-economical) and qualitative criteria(environmental). Quantitative objectives include: slope, transportation system, infrastructures, fault and soil type. Qualitative objectives include: environmental considerations, land use and land cover. Because... 

Location observations from Global Positioning System (GPS) loggers are an important source of data for travel behavior researchers. Using GPS, requires a receiver, a digital map and a software that matches the user logged positions to the map. Identifying the location of the GPS data points on a coded map of the transportation network is not a trivial process. There is always an error in calculating the coordinates obtained from the GPS satellites, and also the available maps are not accurate enough. As a result, map-matching always carries some errors. Thus, different algorithms to do this mapping more precisely are presented. The output of the map-matching process is the identification of... 

Artificial recharge is an effective method of enhancing groundwater resources. Different methods are being used for aquifer recharge, including direct surface and subsurface method, Combined and indirect methods. Among these, direct surface methods such as flood spreading and ditch and furrow techniques are most commonly used methods. They are frequently used in Iran too, but what is disregarded herein, is the application of modern methods of artificial recharge such as ASR and ASTR. ASR and ASTR are methods of artificial recharge through injection wells/borings, in order to recharge deep-seated or those aquifers which are separated by impermeable stratum from the surface. These methods,... 

Iran like other Developing countries is prone to natural disasters. Not only these countries are situated in areas exposed to geological and climatic hazards, but they most significantly lack policies for hazard prevention and mitigation. A considerable amount of residential areas and installations in Tehran are on the mountainous hillsides, therefore the risk related to debris flows has been enlarged. Debris flows represent one of the most dangerous geomorphologic hazards that occur in mountainous areas. Their high mobility can cause damage, not only inside and adjacent to the torrent, but also on the debris fan. The main purpose of this thesis is to present a straight forward procedure to... 

Coinciding with the worldwide environmental issues and increasing demand for clean energy sources, hydropower plants have highly attracted decision- makers attention. Low manufacturing costs and pollutions which are made by these plants in comparison with another types of powerhouses, could be reason of that. And so on, hydropower locating and evaluating studies have been highly increased recently, specifically in developing countries. From the point of operation procedure, hydropower plants are generally divided in two types, run-of-he-river and storage projects. This study has concentrated on run-of-he-river projects and due to spotting plant location, Sefidbarg river basin... 

One of the most important matters beside the shortage and requirement of water in big cities is how to dispose of wastewater. Also concerns with the continued use of centralized facilities include the capacity limitation, increased population growth, sustainable use of water, water shortages due to changes in global cycles and homeland security and disaster mitigation. Therefore the use of decentralized and satellite treatment systems is essential for big cities such as Tehran. One important matter pertaining to this issue is site selection of decentralized wastewater treatment plant. Multicriteria decision making is one of the methods that is used for site selection. By multicriteria... 

Sustainable agricultural development in the country without regard to water supply problems in terms of time and place is not possible. Construction of water storage tanks filled with water and seasonal use in dry seasons in the effective action in the optimal use of water in the climate of (low and irregular rainfall) is. The most important step in the construction of water storage tanks to choose the best point for the construction of the reservoir basin in order to reduce costs and increase efficiency. Chndmyarh different methods to decide the best option for finding a few options from there. Among these methods can be Tapsys two methods (TOPSIS) and hierarchical analysis (AHP) pointed... 

Nowadays due to increasing environmental considerations and effort to reducing of the fossil fuels consumption, the necessity of hydroelectric power plants development is emerged. The purpose of this study is to suggest a method of spatial analysis for finding sites with appropriate potential for construction of these power plants, using TOPSIS and GIS. In this research, using the Python programming language, in software environment of Arc GIS version 9.3, local hydrological model was generated using the DEM layer and using of streams ordering methods, the overall situation along the river were processed. In the next step, with using of fuzzy TOPSIS algorithm implementation in software... 

Optimum railroad alignment, which can be categorized into continuous problems, has been a conundrum for engineers because of two reasons: At the first, there is a wide variety of information that is necessary for finding optimum one. Secondly, the major costs of a railway, such as length-dependent, traffic-dependent, volume-dependent and location-dependent are affected by the numerous factors so that, it may be difficult to formulate them. In order to solve large scale continuous optimization problems, there are two approaches: firstly, such problems may be tackled with a combinatorial optimization algorithm, e.g. ant colony optimization (ACO), by the continuous range of allowed values are... 

A basic highway design problem is to find the most economical alignment connecting two given end points based on topography, soil conditions, socioeconomic factors and environmental impacts, while satisfying a set of design and operational constraints. The cost function complexity and numerous limitations such as highway design criteria have made this problem a NP-hard one. In this study, a swarm based searching algorithm has been applied to a three dimensional highway alignment optimization model. The spatial data has been exploited from a GIS databases using a heuristic swift approach. In addition, the majority of cost items that depend on highway design have been extended in a practical... 

Due to large range searches (there are various alignments between two points) as well as the complex and non-linear cost functions and a variety of geometric constraints, the problem of optimal railway alignment is known as a difficult problem. For this reason, choosing an alignment between two points is usually done based on a limited number of alignments put forward by experts. In recent years, the study of the railway alignment optimization raised again due to the importance of optimization and introduction of various algorithms and their progress in solving various problems. It is expected that applying metaheuristic optimization algorithms, such as methods based on Swarm intelligence... 

Groundwater quality protection has a significant importance due to abundant applications of these resources in various fields such as agriculture, industry and drinking water. Removal of groundwater pollution is a time and money consuming process and often pollution is detected when improving the quality of groundwater is nearly impossible. For this vulnerability assessment there are three methods: Processing, Overlap-Index and Statistical Methods. Overlap-Index is composed of variety of maps such as Geology, Soil, Groundwater Depth and etc which uses in determining of vulnerability Index. In the present study for underground pollution potential determining, four indexes such as AVI، GOD،... 

Estimation of runoff in the ungauged basins is a challenge for hydrologists. The main objective of this research is to produce runoff coefficient map using SCS-CN (1972) and Kennessey (1930) as empirical models to for Urmia Lake basin between for 2006-2011.Both SCS-CN and Kennessey methods use slope, land use, and soil permeability data to estimate surface runoff. Accuracy of each model is tested along with the observed runoff using the Root Mean Square Error (RMSE).Urmia Lake basin includes about 400,000 hectares irrigated land, which constitutes around 10 percent of the entire basin area. To exclude the anthropological activities from the estimations, methods were applied only for 28... 

The citizens’ dissatisfaction with the decreased life and residential care quality is increasing as a result of the rapid growth and development of cities. To find an effective solution to reduce and control these harmful effects is one of the main concerns of urban managers and planners in most countries. In this research, various ecological and sustainability criteria were selected through library-based studies and relative recognition of the region. The Maps were mostly provided through satellite imagery and some by using synoptic data collected from the official aerology website of the country, Iran. Through surveying the experts, different criteria were evaluated and based on the... 

The hourly concentrations of particulate matter in Tehran are modelled in this study. High levels of particles are one of the main air pollution challenges in this metropolis, especially in the colder seasons. A probabilistic neural network is used for modelling. The model uses Bayes' theorem which has a very high ability to tackle the complexities and uncertainties. Traffic, meteorology, land use, baseline concentration (at 5 am), vegetation, along with other data including the location of each station, time of recording each concentration data, area and population of the municipal district of each station are considered. This research introduced a cheap and accurate method for collecting...