Sharif Digital Repository

Modern commercial operations consist of critical equipments that are more susceptible to voltage sag events. The consistent and smooth running of these operations is often disrupted by voltage sags. Diverse range of solutions exist which can enhance the ride through capability of sensitive devices. This paper presents various voltage dip mitigation solutions and a methodology for analyzing the effectiveness and practical viability of these solutions. The proposed approach is based on event tree method which gives an indication about the extent of process interruption in the event of voltage sags. A case study is conducted in the paper with different combinations of practical mitigation... 

The aim of the present work is to propose an eco-design method for sustainable development of methanol production by implementing a multi-objective optimization model based on CO2-efficiency. Two different approaches for the methanol production, i.e. a conventional reference methanol case (RMC) and proposed green integrated methanol case (GIMC) were compared from the view point of eco-design. Using life cycle assessment and process simulation, the environmental features as well as operational decision variables of the RMC and GIMC were assessed. Based on the inventory analysis of LCA, it was found that carbon dioxide is the major emitted pollutant from methanol production. Thus the... 

Anatase nanostructured coating has been prepared on 316 L stainless steel by sol-gel dip coating. The topography of the coatings surface has been analyzed using atomic force microscopy. The anticorrosion performance of the coatings has been evaluated using polarization curves. Effects of calcination temperature, withdrawal speed and times of coating on corrosion protection have been studied. The results showed calcination temperature of 400°C and withdrawal speed of 10 cm/min are desirable conditions to achieve high corrosion protection of 316 L stainless steel in chloride containing environments. Coatings with 3 times exhibit better resistance against corrosion in 0.5 molar NaCl solutions.... 

This paper presents a new set of reliability sensitivity measures. The purpose is to identify the optimal manner in which to mitigate risk to civil infrastructure, and reduce model uncertainty in order to improve risk estimates. Three measures are presented. One identifies the infrastructure components that should be prioritized for retrofit. Another measure identifies the infrastructure that should be prioritized for more refined modeling. The third measure identifies the models that should be prioritized in research to improve models, for example by gathering new data. The developments are presented in the context of a region with 622 buildings that are subjected to seismicity from several... 

Reliability methods are employed in this paper to analyze the seismic risk to the Vancouver metropolitan region in Canada. The use of reliability methods contrasts with several contemporary approaches for risk analysis. In this paper, two analysis approaches are presented and implemented in a new computer program. One utilizes the first-order and second-order reliability methods together with a hazard combination technique. The other is a sampling-based method that repeatedly generates damage scenarios in the time period of interest. Both strategies employ the same collection of probabilistic models for seismic risk analysis. While the models are presented in the companion paper, this paper... 

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to describe the use of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) to simulate indoor radon distribution and ventilation effects. This technique was used to predict and visualize radon content and indoor air quality in a one-family detached house in Stockholm. The effects of intake fans, exhaust fans and doors on radon concentration were investigated. Design/methodology/approach: In this study a mechanically balanced ventilation system and a continuous radon monitor (CRM) were used to measure the indoor ventilation rate and radon levels. In a numerical approach, the FLUENT CFD package was used to simulate radon entry into the building and ventilation effects.... 

Despite widespread use of SRAM-based reconfigurable devices (SRDs) in mainstream applications, their usage has been very limited in enterprise and safety-critical applications due to SRAM susceptibility to soft errors. Previous mitigation techniques to protect SRDs impose significant area and power overheads. Additionally, they suffer from susceptibility of configuration bits to multiple bit upsets (MBUs). In this paper, we present a highly available fault-tolerant architecture to protect SRD-based designs against MBUs in both configuration and user bits. In the proposed architecture, the entire design is duplicated with respect to the relative locations of logic blocks within the SRD and... 

Radon is released from soil and building materials and can accumulate in residential buildings. Breathing radon and radon progeny for extended periods hazardous to health and can lead to lung cancer. Indoor air conditions and ventilation systems strongly influence indoor radon concentrations. This paper focuses on effects of air change rate, indoor temperature and relative humidity on indoor radon concentrations in a one family detached house in Stockholm, Sweden.In this study a heat recovery ventilation system unit was used to control the ventilation rate and a continuous radon monitor (CRM) was used to measure radon levels. FLUENT, a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software package was... 

The promotion of the adoption of renewable energies in deprived and remote areas can be considered as an important step towards reduction of threats to the loss of biodiversity through community mobilization. One important outcome is mitigation of the deforestation processes through firewood collection. The aim is achievement of sustainable development of the forest biodiversity, awareness raising and the capacity building for execution of similar projects. The social and economical aspects and the obstacles for execution of such project were investigated and guidelines were prepared to facilitate the promotion of renewable energy in similar small communities  

This paper proposes an efficient crosstalk mitigation method for Network-on-Chips. This method uses the binary-reflected Gray coding to send the proper code word into a channel. As the Gray code has reflective and unit distance properties, based on these facts, content of every flit is selected so that to minimize the number of forbidden transition patterns in the channel. A VHDL-based simulation is carried out for several channel widths. Simulation results show that the proposed method reduces the forbidden transitions up to 26% and can save power in NoC links  

Modern commercial operations consist of critical equipments that are more susceptible to voltage sag events. The consistent and smooth running of these operations is often disrupted by voltage sags. Diverse range of solutions exist which can enhance the ride through capability of sensitive devices. This paper presents various voltage dip mitigation solutions and a methodology for analyzing the effectiveness and practical viability of these solutions. The proposed approach is based on event tree method which gives an indication about the extent of process interruption in the event of voltage sags. A case study is conducted in the paper with different combinations of practical mitigation... 

Background: A new design for a methanol plant is proposed in which CO 2 addition, as one of the important parameters, is used to optimize the synthesis gas composition. An attempt has been made to assess the environmental features as well as the process operability of the proposed plant, in which the required CO 2 is provided from reformer flue gas. As a starting point, simulation of a conventional reference methanol case (RMC) and also the proposed green integrated methanol case (GIMC) are performed to obtain operational and kinetic parameters. In order to compare properly GIMC and RMC, the objective function is defined so that SynGas production, and thereby methanol production, in the GIMC... 

Floating urbanization could be the subject of a green flood mitigation strategy. The main part of any floating house is the buoyant part, which is made from concrete pontoons. Aggregates play the most important role in making concrete a lightweight material. Oil Palm Shell (OPS) is an agricultural waste material, which is widely available in South East Asia. This study tries to select the best cementing material from waste and produced pozzolans, to improve the specifications of green lightweight concrete with Oil Palm Shell (OPS), using decision-making methods. The decision making model was conducted by the application of a Fuzzy Preference Selection Index (PSI). Quantitative data was... 

Multiple description coding (MDC) is a technique where multiple streams from a source video are generated, each individually decodable and mutually refinable. MDC is a promising solution to overcome packet loss in video transmission over noisy channels, particularly for real-time applications in which retransmission of lost information is not practical. A problem with conventional MDC is that the achieved side distortion quality is considerably lower than single description coding (SDC) quality except at high redundancies which in turn leads to central quality degradation. In this paper, a new mixed layer MDC scheme is presented with no degradation in central quality, and providing better... 

Multiple Description Coding (MDC) is a technique where multiple streams from a source are generated, each individually decodable and mutually refinable. In this paper, a new Mixed Layer MDC (MLMDC) scheme is presented which achieves a higher side quality compared to conventional MDCs. The improved side performance leads to higher average video quality at the receiver in lossy networks. For each DCT coefficient, we generate two coefficients: Base Coefficient (BC) and Enhancement Coefficient (EC) which are combined together. When all descriptions are available, they are decomposed and decoded to achieve high quality video. When one description is not available, we use estimation to extract as... 

A friction damper device (FDD) is used for vibration control of an existing steel jacket platform under seismic excitation. First, the damping is presented for vibration mitigation of structures located in seismically active zones. A new method for quick design of friction or yielding damping devices is presented. The effectiveness of the damping system employing such FDDs in a jacket platform is evaluated numerically. The influence of key parameters of the damping system on the vibration suppression of the offshore structure is studied in detail. To examine the vibration control effectiveness of the FDD for the jacket platform, performance of the controlled structure under the seismic... 

The desire to decrease electrical loading by using energy efficient lighting has resulted in a high level of attention to replacing conventional incandescent lamps with compact fluorescent lamps (CFL). In Iran from energy management point of view, people are encouraged by ministry of power to use CFLs. Also after elimination of subsidies, the substantial increase in electric energy price resulted in a high level of penetration of CFLs in electricity grid. CFL is a nonlinear load, therefore it injects harmonic to the network. In past, due to lower application of CFL, these harmonics were ignored, however today by the widespread application of CFLs; these small sources are combined and have... 

Non Line of Sight (NLOS) propagation is a challenging issue which cause large errors in wireless localization systems. NLOS is especially a dominant source of errors in metropolitan area wireless networks like cellular ones. We discuss our algorithms within cellular network terminology. This paper contributes two novel algorithms. The first algorithm is to extract the NLOS state of base stations and the second one is a correction algorithm to enhance the measurements accuracy. Our introduced algorithms can easily operate with other wireless localization algorithms and reduced NLOS error. These algorithms are proposed for network-based localization because of the amount of calculation