Sharif Digital Repository

Schools are known as the educational infrastructure of countries. Most people in the community spend more than 12 years of their education in schools. The organization for development, renovation, and equipping of in Iran, as the custodian of school construction in the country, has moved towards using new technologies due to the problems encountered in schools' construction. Among these tools, BIM is selected to help project management and control. For BIM implementation on the macro scale, readiness assessment plays a significant role. In this dissertation, an attempt has been made to provide a model for evaluating the needs, use BIM, and evaluate the organization by having a strategic... 

Damming projects always have been important while construction, operation and even demolition due to their major effects on society, environment and economy. Although researchers have focused on one or a few phases of construction projects to develop sustainable infrastructures, the research community has to consider long term effects of developments too. There are a variety of such effects that ignoring them will cause construction of not convenient infrastructures i.e. air pollution and over-consumption of energy resources while construction, operation and demolition. Therefore, it is suggested to consider life cycle assessments to include all bad effects in all phases of a project. Dams... 

Hyperscale cloud data center (HCDC) (a.k.a., hyperscale data center) is the backbone of a wide variety of Internet services such as web-hosting, ecommerce, social networking, software as a service (SaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), application as a service (AaaS), and cloud computing.HCDC platforms consist of massive parallel processing, high utilization rate, and high volume storage that cost hundreds of million dollars.The increased demand for various Internet services and the subsequent dramatic growth in HCDC platforms, have caused an exponential increase in utilization of energy. With energy costs on the rise and global attention focused on carbon footprints, organizations are... 

Preserving and promoting the health of citizens in a society is one of the most important problems addressed in any country. The power sector discharges a huge volume of carbon dioxide which intensifies the climate change and consequent human health problems.The goal of this study is to evaluate the ultimate effect of climate change caused by power plant emissions on the human health using life cycle analysis approach for different provinces in Iran. An integrated model has been developed to evaluate the impact of climate change due to power plant emissions on the human health. This model includes the equations regarding the variations in carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere,... 

Controlling, managing, and mitigating the emission of greenhouse gases, especially carbon dioxide, which are produced by human activities, are one of the main concerns of researchers today. Market-based methods are one the successful methods to enhance controlling, managing, and mitigating carbon dioxide emissions, among which the carbon tax has received more attention. Increasing clean technologies in the electricity network to the reduce the emissions of the electricity industry may reduce the carbon tax rate. In this regard, the life cycle analysis makes it possible to consider the emissions of the life cycle. The present model is applied for two representative days of Iran's electricity... 

The present study aims to reduce the carbon footprint of greenhouse products to provide a decision tool for sustainable development of greenhouses. In order to provide this decision tool, the impact of four scenarios or energy-efficient technology for greenhouse heating, including: combine heat and power system(CHP), new greenhouse covering material, industrial symbiosis, and solar collector on the carbon footprint of greenhouse products has been studied because one of the main factors in the release of carbon footprints of greenhouse products is the use of fossil fuels for greenhouse heating. Energy modeling has been used to estimate the amount of heating, cooling, and artificial lighting... 

The growing amounts of generation of electronic wastes (e-waste) and their increasing environmental impacts require a special optimal waste management strategy. Many different methods have been developed to managing e-waste. To make the best choices according to the conditions of each system, having an adequate knowledge of all methods and comparing them is the most important point. This research aims to design a system for managing e-waste by selecting mobile phones as an example of electronic waste and find the optimal condition of the system to increase economic benefits and reduce environmental impact. Recycling and landfill are selected as the main methods in this project. Four lines... 

According to the increasing population, the demand for electricity and its generation increased significantly. Increasing production of energy cause to degrade the environment. Given that about 92 percent of Iran's electricity is supplied by fossil fuel power plants, the importance of considering the negative role of power plants in environmental degradation is twice. In this study, the environmental impacts and sustainability of two steam and combined cycle power plants in Iran have been evaluated using emergy and life cycle analyses and their integration. In addition, the effects of fuel change and application of emission control methods on results of the life cycle and emergy analyses... 

Continuous increase of energy demand, scarcity of resources, as well as environmental limitations have led to the need to reduce carbon emissions. In this research, an MINLP model based on the mathematical optimization formulation is proposed to reach this issue in a large cogeneration unit. Advantage of the hierarchical approach for carbon management are avoiding individual carbon reduction policies, and embedding emission control techniques in a hierarchical mathematical model that helps us to select the most appropriate policies and prioritize each other. In the carbon management hierarchy, the optimization of the base cycle is done at the first stage. Then, the use of renewable energies... 

By changing the approaches towards the waste management, it is possible to affect the resource depletion. This research is focused on economic and environmental impacts of waste production and treatment. In this research, the municipal solid waste management system have been evaluated by an integrated approach considering the Life cycle assessment and Emergy assessment methods. The integrated method have been used to evaluate the waste management system more fundamentally and analyze some upstream indicators which are related to natural resource scarcity. At first, some scenarios have been developed based on Life cycle assessment containing possible configurations of technologies. Then, an... 

EROI is an indicator to analyse energy productivity of a resource. EROI of Sirri operation unit is assessed in two different levels. Direct energy consumption and total associated gas are used in first and second level respectively. Two important aspects of the present research are considering environmental externalities and estimation of EROI related to outputs of multi-production systems. Also a model is introduced to identify relationship between oil price and EROI. Energy Abatement Cost is used to include environmental externalities to EROI. Thre benchmarks – price, energy and exergy content and exergy cost – are considered as a basis to for estimating EROI. Using LCA for taking into... 

Today, building sectors account for 34% of total energy consumption in Iran. Increasing demand of the comfort level along with population growth necessitates much more attention about energy requirements in the country. Such phenomenon has already raised concerns about the heavy environmental impacts. The present research studies minimization of global warming potential effect for an educational building by developing life cycle optimization model. The Department of Engineering of Sharif University of Technology is selected as the case study and optimal solutions has been achieved for this building. Results state that implementing cogeneration and renewable energies can reduce20 -25% of the... 

Clean and Renewable energies are one of the most important part of global policy. In order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions mostly from fossil fuels, many countries have introduced biofuels to avoid depletion of fossil fuels and decrease the pollution. In Iran, large dependency on crude oil and natural gas resources cause barriers for utilization of biofuels. The country has plenty of biomass resources that may guide national decision makers toward biofuels.In this study, biomass supply chain to produce biofuel is studied to reach sustainability. The model enables us to depict the optimal path to reach the economic, environmental, and social sustainability through the whole supply chain.... 

Depletion of fossil energy reserves and rapid growth of energy demand have been challenging issues in the energy sector. Proper solution of these issues requires development of an integrated and comprehensive approaches. Such conceptual framework could provide an appropriate means for studying energy problems and anlysing the development of efficient technologies which could improve the economic viability and reduce the impact of energy system on the environmental. Therefore, analytical tools need to be developed further and they could be applied for systematic analysis of impact of new energy technologies on the economical efficiency and environmental compatibility of energy... 

Industrial centrifuge fans operate in various industries, specifically heavy industries such as pelletizing plants, steel mills, and cement plants. These fans transfer process gas in the production cycle. In some cases, due to their off-design working conditions, asymmetrical wear and failure happen on one side of the impeller's blades more than the other side. The most important reason is the heterogeneity of the entrance fluid's properties. One of the many critical parameters in this issue is the asymmetric distribution of particles between the two entrances of the fan. This research investigates the asymmetric erosion problem of a specific centrifugal fan with a double-suction side... 

Cost Estimation plays an essential and role in UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) Projects. By increasing the complexity of new unmanned systems, the importance of this task augments. Additionally, up to now, a comprehensive approach has not been adopted internationally. But in parallel a number of international companies and organizations has developed specific methods by themselves; confined to their corporate.
This project pursues developing a complexity-based model for cost estimation of unmanned aerial vehicles, especially Jet UAVs. However, it’s anticipated that this model may be utilized for all kind of systems, but it seems that jet UAVs use it with a better and more reliable... 

New technology-based firms (NTBFs) are the driving force behind creating innovation and technology in countries and can play a crucial role in job creation and economic growth. These companies also facilitate technology transfer and strengthen the absorptive capacity of national innovation systems. Therefore, given the externalities of these companies, as well as their significant role in promoting innovation, governments around the world implement policies to support these firms. In Iran, the Vice President for Science and Technology has implemented policies to support NTBFs since 2013. Recently, a few studies have been carried out to evaluate these policies. However, the number of these... 

Technological catchup has been one of the topics of interest for researchers and policymakers, especially in developing countries, and has been studied from various dimensions. The catchup in the renewable energy industries is important due to the possibility of benefiting from its economic dimensions along with responding to the growing energy demand in these countries, as well as accessing the sustainable sources of energy supply. In the literature, various dimensions have been studied to investigate the factors affecting the technological catchup, one of the most important of them is the technology life cycle. In answer to the question of what stages of the technological area life cycle... 

One of the biggest challenges in software companies is reaching a common understanding between staff members across the organization with different expertise. If not solved, this problem could cause other organizational problems, such as project failures, lack of innovation in new products, organizational conflict, and even interppersonal conflicts between employees and/or managers. Recent research has shown that boundary objects can help decrease knowledge gaps between workers.This research reviews boundary objects’ properties, life cycle, and effects by investigating some boundary objects in a startup software company. This research’s goal is to increase the knowledge about boundary... 

This paper decomposes the saving rate into cohort, age and year effects. This objective is accomplished by constructing a pseudo-panel that amalgamates nineteen consecutive, cross-sectional Household Income and Expenditure Surveys from 1991 to 2009. To construct year-of-birth cohorts with consistent composition over time, analyses are limited to those born between 1926 and 1975. Results reveal that those belonging to younger cohorts save a higher fraction of their income relative to their predecessors at the same age. Moreover, the increase in the saving rate can not be explained by the significant decline in household size or rise in educational attainment among younger cohorts. Closer...