Sharif Digital Repository

During the last few decades, efforts have been made to replace fossil fuels with clean and non-absorbent energy sources. One of the promising strategies is energy production by hydrogen storage using water splitting. For this purpose, different methods of using light, heat and electricity are provided. Electrolysis of water with a simple environment such as very high purity of hydrogen produced, controllable, device, no need for high temperature and pressure in the reactor and huge potential for industrial applications has been very much considered. Water electrolysis consists of two reactions: reduction of water to hydrogen (HER) and oxidation of water to oxygen (OER). The second reaction... 

Due to unusual response of structures of buildings with irregularity in their architecture to dynamic excitations, to have a comprehensive knowledge of their behavior during earthquakes is of utmost importance. Building irregularities are in general divided into two major categories, namely Irregularity in Plane and Irregularity in Elevation, and one of the forms of the latter is where there is a split in the levels of the building. In this work, through a series of case studies, the effects of P- phenomenon on the behavior of steel split-level building structures were studied. 5, 10 and 15 story buildings with 5 and 6 bays, and level splitting of 30, 60, 90, 120 and 150 cm were studied. All... 

In the recent years, increasing concerns about the environmental issues necessitatecientists and industrial people to introduce clean and zero emissions vehicles to the global market. Relying on this acute demand,Hybrid Electric Vehicles (HEVs) are knownas one potential solution to lessen the negative effects of transportation industry on ecological systems.HEVs combine an Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) with an Electric Motor/Generator (EMG) and an Energy Storage System (ESS) to produce a fuel efficient and low or zero pollutant powertrain. Increasing the number of components in the powertrain requires a sophisticated strategy to control all drive-line components suitably. Surely, the best... 

Given the population growth in the world and in dire need of electricity and to reduce pollution and moving toward sustainable development, renewable energy has special importance in the world. Iran, with 300 days of sunshine a year is one of the countries with high potential in the field of solar energy but for various reasons, solar energy has no significant role in our energy portfolio. Considering the purchase of solar power by the government, reduce solar electricity costs and payback time of the factors that could make greater use of this energy. In this projects using light splitting method, in addition to reducing cell area used, by removing a significant portion of the sun's rays... 

There has been growing interest in exploiting cellular network data for transportation planning purposes in recent years. In this thesis, we utilize these data for determining mode of travel in the city of Shiraz, Iran. Cellular data records -including location updates in 5minute time intervals- of 300,000 users from the city of Shiraz has been collected for 40 hours in three consecutive days in a cooperation with the major telecommunications service provider of the country. Depending on the density of mobile BTS’s in different zones of the city, the user location can be located within an average of 200 meters. Considering data filtering and smoothing, data preparation and converting them to... 

Generally concrete dams have not been sited at location where there were faults classified as active. However, there may be sites suitable for concrete dams where there is some possibility of fault displacement occurring underneath the dam. In addition, there may be situations where an existing dam was constructed over a fault thought to be inactive and later determined to be active, due to different approaches of classification of a fault whether it is active or not. Also some discontinuities may be observed during construction. For these cases nonlinear analysis and criteria will be required to assess the capability of concrete dams to safely withstand fault displacements. In this thesis,... 

In recent years, with the continuous growth and development of wireless communication systems, the demand for the use of radio spectrum has increased significantly, which has led to problems such as a shortage of spectrum. An effective solution to the spectrum shortage problem is to use cognitive radio. One of the main functions of cognitive radio networks is spectrum sensing and our focus in this study is to examine machine learning and deep learning methods to improve cooperative spectrum sensing. Since channel and noise parameters are not accurate in telecommunication systems, we need to use a method to estimate these parameters. In this regard, the structure of Bayesian with neural... 

Depleting resources and heavy pollution of fossil fuels have drawn the world's attention to clean energy and the most ideal one is hydrogen. Water splitting is one of the most effective ways to produce hydrogen and due to slow kinetic rate different kind of catalysts (optical, electrochemical, etc.) are developed for this reaction. In this work a ZIF-67 and N-doped graphene quantum dots composite is developed and its electrocatalytic performance in oxygen evolution reaction is evaluated. The synthesized graphene quantum dots are between 2-4 nm and the incorporation of nitrogen atom in their structure was verified by FTIR analysis. The metal-organic framework which is produced in this work... 

The objective of this project is numerical simulation of air flow and heat transfer between two horizontal concentric cylinders with rotation of inner cylinder and inertia of outer cylinder grooves on the inner cylinder. In this study, the air, meanwhile rotational motion by the inner cylinder will enter into the annular space between two cylinders with certain flow rate. It can be mentioned to cooling of power plant generators, Electric motors and rotating machines among usages of air flow between two cylinders. In this article the objective is calculation of pressure drop and Nusselt number, temperature distribution on the inner cylinder under conditions of constant temperature of... 

In this work the response modification factor (RMF), behaviour factor, of two-dimensional regular and split-level steel braced frames was worked out and presented. A total number of 840 frames with various number of stories, spans, braced spans and span lengths were studied. Frames were loaded based on ASCE 7-10 and designed in accordance with AISC 360-10. Static nonlinear analysis and Uang method were used for obtaining the RMFs of the studied frames. The effect of split-level irregularity and parameters such as number of stories on the RMF were worked out and are presented in this thesis. Linear regression was used to develop formulae for RMFs of regular and split-level braced frames.... 

Hydrogen is emerging as a clean and ideal fuel. However, its dependency on freshwater resources will be a threat to a sustainable environment. Considering the abundance of seawater and the scarcity of freshwater resources, direct electrolysis of seawater to produce hydrogen fuel can be a promising and potential alternative to pure water electrolysis technologies. Seawater contains electrochemically active ions with the nature of competition with the oxidation reaction of water, thus affecting the catalytic activity and, subsequently, the selectivity. From the thermodynamic and kinetic aspect in the electrolysis of seawater, the unfavorable reaction related to the formation of chlorine... 

Due to imminent shortage of fossil fuels, environmental issues that occur from their intensive use, population growth and industrialization of societies moving towards renewable energy sources is inevitable. Sun is the most clean and abundant source of energy but it is needed to be accompanied with an energy storage system as it is intermittent and cannot supply our required energies on demand. Water splitting electrochemical cells are promising solutions to cope with this problem by producing hydrogen as a clean fuel. The overpotential imposed by anode is the bottleneck of the water splitting reaction. The anodes with sufficient efficiency that are used today are made from precious and... 

Photoelectrochemical (PEC) water splitting is exceedingly promising for converting solar energy into molecular hydrogen as a clean and sustainable fuel. However, the overall rate of water splitting reaction is severely limited by the sluggish kinetics of the anodic half-reaction, namely, the oxygen evolution reaction (OER). Bismuth vanadate (BiVO4) is a popular photoanode for PEC water splitting due to its high stability, low cost, narrow band gap (2.4 eV), high visible-light absorption, and environmental compatibility. However, BiVO4 suffers from poor charge transfer, fast recombination of electron-hole pairs, and inferior catalytic activity toward OER. An effective strategy to overcome... 

Water hammer is a pressure surge or wave resulting when a pressurized fluid in motion is forced to stop or change direction suddenly. This phenomenon can cause great amount of damage to the system and should be considered in designing of pipe systems. So, researchers have derived and proposed numerous models using different approaches. In this study a one-dimensional model using Time Splitting Method (TSM) and Double Sweep Method (DSM) are proposed to simulate transient flow in deformable pipes in networks. To solve the equations of momentum and continuity TSM is applied. In addition Brunone model is used to study the effect of unsteady friction on water hammer wave shape and attenuation. To... 

In this work, a direct design approach for designing a surface shape (inverse design problem) has been developed in which both the target surface pressure and the unknown nodal coordinates appear explicitly in the formulations. The final discretized form of the governing equations (unified formulation) can be used for both analysis and shape design problems. Shape design problems in the context of the steady inviscid and compressible flow, based on the three-dimensional Euler equations, were directly solved to achieve a prescribed pressure along the solid boundaries. The AUSM+ scheme was used to discretize the flux terms in the Euler equations, in which the inviscid flux is splitted into... 

Growing demand on energy and limitation and consequence of fossil fuels have caused to utilize the clean and renewable energy sources. Hydrogen is a clean energy carrier which produced just water vapor during combustion. Today, methods which are usually used to produce this fuel are based on using fossil fuel compounds. Therefore, utilizing new production methods is unavoidable. One of these methods is using semiconductors such as TiO2 to spilt water and produce H2 by solar irradiation. Reducing the energy gap of these semiconductors to match the solar spectrum, specially in its visible range, modification of their structures, surfaces and stability are the main challenges in hydrogen... 

Electrochemical water splitting which consists of two half-reactions, namely; the hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) and the oxygen evolution reaction (OER), is an important process in electrochemical energy storage and sustainable production of energy. Therefore, the development of cost-effective and efficient electrocatalysts for water splitting has attracted a lot of interest. In this work, a new nanocomposite was prepared from cobalt diselenide and cerium (IV) oxide derived from calcination of a cerium-based metal-organic framework (Ce-MOF), via hydrothermal and electrodeposition methods. The structure and morphology of synthesized materials were investigated by XRD, FE-SEM, EDX, and BET... 

Studying the behavior of materials at high strain rate is necessary for design and analysis of structures subjected to impact loading. Therefore, design and construction of apparatuses that enable us for testing various materials under impact loading is very important. The split Hopkinson pressure bar test -one of the most important impact tests- is utilized for dynamic loading at constant strain rates ranging from 100 to 10000 1/s.
In this thesis, first we explain about the behavior of materials at high strain rates and then focus on the behavior of polymers -that are widely used in different industries- under impact loading. Also, basic concepts of polymeric Hopkinson pressure bar and... 

The global energy outlook has been altered as a result of mounting concerns regarding fossil fuels. Electrocatalysts have become a favorable alternative for renewable energy production processes, particularly in the fields of hydrogen evolution reactions (HER) and oxygen evolution (OER). This study focuses on the production and enhancement of nanocatalysts, specifically materials based on ZIF-67, for the purpose of water splitting. The initial phase included the synthesis of the ZIF-67 structure through the simple room-temperature coprecipitation process, utilizing cerium as a dual-metal component. The molarity of the cerium was optimized in the ZIF-67 framework to achieve the most desirable... 

In This article, we aimed to estimate impact of dual sourcing strategy on environmental implication and show how this strategy can ameliorate the emission of greenhouse gases. For this purpose, first we define comprehensive NLP models for splitting order problem with carbon emission cap and carbon emission Trade-Cap policy. Then customized sequential quadratic programming approach had been developed for solving these models. In addition, customized Genetic Algorithm validated this approach. Finally numerical results show that order splitting strategy cause to reduction in costs and emission at same time. Beside this outcome, we show the so-called Trade- Cap policy almost performs better than...