Sharif Digital Repository

The produced crude oil from the petroleum reservoirs usually has a value of brine (water and salt) this matter can be caused the corrosion of refinery equipment. The large part of this brine creates a stable emulsion with oil, that it couldn't be separated easily. For separation and demulsification of this emulsion, some chemical, mechanical, thermal and electrical methods can be executed. In chemical method, demulsifier materials can be added to water-in-oil emulsion. Different parameters such as properties of oil, type and concentration of demulsifiers, volume factor of water and etc., can affect the efficiency of water-in-oil emulsion separation. In this study, emulsification mechanism,... 

An important step in the early stages of an oilfield development is the accurate identification of the location of production and injection wells which has a significant impact on productivity and profitability of the reservoir. Recently, operation companies in petroleum industry focus on production optimization, recovery enhancement and cost reduction; as a result, application of non-conventional wells (NCW) or non-vertical wells have dramatically increased. Well placement optimization is a complicated task as it is a function of several contributing factors including reservoir heterogeneities and economic constraints. The complexity of this task increases when it is considered as a... 

Determining the porosity, water saturation and permeability values in the reservoir rock, are major steps in the petroleum engineering and formation evaluation. Today in the oil industry, these parameters are obtained using Helium gas injection technique on core (Plug) samples. However, the coring operation is difficult and costly. In addition, there isn't the possibility of coring in some of wells, such as horizontal wells. In fact, the present research is the modelling of artificial neural networks to estimate permeability in one of the Iranian oil field reservoirs by using oil well logging data. In this research, MLP neural network has been used and for network training, the evolutionary... 

Classification of Traffic Internet obtained early interest in the computer science community. Various methods have been presented for classifying the traffic of Internet to manage both security and Quality of Service (QoS). Nonetheless, traditional methods of classification including scheme of Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) have not been accepted because of their complicated management. Classification method of network through learning algorithms of machine is the most popular classification method of traffic at this time. ELM was proposed as a modern algorithm of learning for the Single-hidden Layer Feed Forward Neural Networks (SLFNs). Meanwhile, learning process... 

Combined geothermal heat pump and solar collector system is a kind of load supply system for dwellings and greenhouses that operates by relying on renewable energies. The advantage of this system over conventional systems is lower power consumption. The aim of this study is to optimize the hybrid system so that in addition to reducing energy consumption and exergy destroied of the system, economically be minimized. In fact, in this study, we are dealing with an issue that should be optimize from different aspects. firstly, thermodynamic modeling for vertical ground source heat pump is done and then by considering 11 decision variables, the system is optimized by using single-objective and... 

Given many computing errors in current systems, a method appears necessary for predicting the nuclear parameter quickly and accurately. In this thesis, a neural network was used to predict safety in a nuclear power plant in order to develop an operating aid tool for preventive measures.First, some studies were conducted on appropriate feature selection for training neural networks. Some case studies have also been carried out on parameter prediction through soft computing in a power plant. In the next section, an expert judgment was taken into account to select DNBR (Departure from Nucleate Boiling Ratio) as a criterion for safety evaluation in the exploitation of a nuclear power plant (PWR)... 

In a solar central system plant about 40% of energy losses occurs in the heliostat field. Furtheremore, half of the investment costs for construction of the plant is related to the heliostat field. Therefore, an optimal design of the heliostat field is necessary for reduction of levelized cost of energy in solar tower power plants. In this study, in order to optimally design the heliostat field, first energy performance of the helistat field in one year is simulated. Solar power and sun’s position at each moment of the day is determined by mathematical relations. Then, loss factors in the field are modelled and heliostat field layout is designed by an algorithm. Finally, by using PSO... 

In this research, the aerial load transportation in the urban environment by cooperative quadrotors is investigated. This system requires two sub-systems: path planning and control. The path planning subsystem designs the payload's path and at the same time determines the shape of the flight formation of agents in order to be able to carry the payload. The design of the path-formation is done in the presence of constraints such as the collision avoidance with obstacles, inter-collision avoidance to each other, the collision avoidance of the slung load with the obstacles and the minimum and maximum allowable cables' forces. Therefore, the shape of the formation flight is determined... 

Iin this thesis, evaporation of droplets of a spray from a pressure-swirl injector in a sub-atmospheric combustion chamber is studied. The liquid used in this sudy is a hypergolic oxidizer, Dinitrogen Tetroxide, also known as NTO. The significance of this thesis is its application during the cold startup of a satellite thruster when only oxidizer is injected into the combustion chamber. The most important phenomemon in this stage which is also the focal point for this study, is the ‘Flashing’. In this phenomenon a liquid having a temperature above the boiling point of its own species (for the surrounding gas pressure) is present in the solution field. This state is a non-equilibrium state.... 

In this research work, several guidance laws have been utilized and validated, considering the contraints on the missslie seeker angle and maximum acceleration, in order to simultaneously intercept the so-called Close-in Weapon System (CIWS) by multiple missiles. First of all, the existing guidance laws for salvo-attack are reveiwed. Then, a simulation program has been developed and validated for the misslie and CIWS as a five and two degrees of freedom systems, respectively. Optimization of the system is then carried out by the method of Particle Swarm Optimization, considering the given constraints. In the next step, for the improvement of the optimized guidance law, paramertic study has... 

In line with advances in science and technology in the areas of robotics, artificial intelligence, computer and control, unmanned vehicles are being more utilized and focused. On the other hand, development and further advances of these vehicles is highly dependent on the level of their autonomy. Motion planning is one of the most important issues in this regard. Due to high levels of autonomy required for unmanned air vehicles (UAV), the subject of motion planning is of valuable interest in aerospace applications. The goal of the motion planning problem, that is the subject of this research, is to extract an optimal trajectory for the UAV from an initial location toward its target point... 

Planning safe rendezvous and docking trajectories between two spacecrafts has a high importance in the space applications. In order to make two spacecrafts moving in different orbits closer, two stages must be completed simultaneously: First the implementation of rendezvous maneuver which deals with the generation of control/guidance commands leading to trajectories that lead the chaser towards the target. Second the docking maneuver incorporation which makes the two spacecrafts closer with the relative zero attitude. Various approaches have been dealt with till now using the analytical and numerical approaches generally considering rendezvous, not the docking maneuver. These approaches... 

As the applications of wireless sensor networks are expanding at an increasing rate, design of these networks so that they conform to the requirements of a specific application is considered to be a major challenge. Regarding to the specific application, network designers consider various suitable parameters to improve and then to enhance the efficiency of the network. Parameters included are such as area coverage, lifetime, reliability and etc which can significantly improve with the precise placement of nodes. Node localization problem in wireless sensor networks aiming at improvement of the performance parameters has been solved by different methods. In this thesis, in order to solve this... 

Image Registration is a fundamental task in numerous applications in medical image processing and is defined as the process of determining the correspondence of between images collected at different times or using different imaging modalities. This correspondence can be used for aligning images so that the pair can be directly compared, combined or analyzed. Image-guided surgery systems use registration for establishing an accurate relation between preoperative and intraoperative image space. There have been several methods for rigid registration which are not easily applicable for soft tissues. Indeed, nonrigid deformation of soft tissues will endanger the accuracy of rigid methods, so it... 

This study proposes an efficient risk-targeted framework for integrated optimal seismic design and quantifying target safety of steel Special Moment-Resisting Frames (steel SMRFs) with and without various passive damping devices such as Buckling-Restrained Braces (BRBs), Friction Dampers (FDs), and Fluid Viscous Dampers (FVDs). This framework provides an automated design procedure formulated as a constrained single-objective optimization problem to achieve the minimum Life Cycle Cost (LCC) within the Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm and can be the basis of current seismic codes for target safety calibration. LCC includes initial construction cost and lifetime seismic losses such... 

The purpose of this research is to monitor the health of structures using the updated finite element model, in which digital images are used to optimize the numerical model. Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) is always an important and significant issue that has attracted the attention of many researchers in recent years. In general, some researches have been conducted in this field using physical sensors that provide discrete data to the system for analysis. Using cameras to monitor the structure makes it possible to extract continuous and integrated data from the structure using digital images, which is a significant advantage compared to physical sensors.In this research, a steel... 

Due to inevitable uncertain sources in modeling, operational and environmental conditions, finite element model and structure’s response to a same load pattern differs drastically. To reduce this difference and make the model’s response close to the real structure, finite element model updating procedure is essential. Updated model can be used for structural assessment, damage identification, remaining service life estimation, and structural control. Model updating methods are categorized into two groups in term of information domain used for model updating; time-domain methods and frequency-domain approaches. Time-domain methods have a preference because of the main drawbacks of frequency... 

In this paper the predictive equations for collapse assessment of shear links used in eccentric braced frames are developed. An extensive database including results of over 70 cyclic tests on steel wide flange shear links is collected and the structural parameters governing the hysteresis behavior are calibrated using a simplified numerical model. The methodology of calibration is to minimize the discrepancy between the experimental hysteresis loops and the corresponding numerical results using Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm. The objective function of PSO algorithm is minimized by iterating parameters that govern the hysteresis behavior of the numerical model. Stepwise... 

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... 

Travel time is the most significant element in choosing among different modes of transportation. In order to increase the public transportation’s utility we need to utilize some methods to reduce public transportation travel time and passenger delay. Bus system, as one of the major types of public transportation, is mainly influenced by the traffic flow more than other types of public transportation. In order to increase the bus system’s reliability we need to utilize a controlling system so that we could increase its movement discipline and reduce line’s disruption. In this research we proposed an optimization model based on bus holding strategy and the real-time data from the route. This...