Sharif Digital Repository

A new design for heat pump integrated humidification-dehumidification (HDH-HP) desalination cycles was proposed in the current experimental study. An evaporative condenser was designed and fabricated instead of a separate humidifier, heater, and air/water-cooled condensers find in previous HDH-HP systems. Meanwhile, the air dehumidification process in this work directly occurred inside the heat pump evaporator. The effect of several operating parameters such as ambient wet-bulb temperature, spraying saline water and airflow rates, compressor speed, superheat, and evaporator saturation temperature control modes of the electronic expansion valve (EEV) on freshwater production and GOR were... 

In this study, the mechanisms of passing water and salt ions through nanoporous single-layer graphene membrane are simulated using classical molecular dynamics. The effects of functional groups placed in nanopores and feed water's salt concentration on water desalination are investigated. In order to understand the role of functional groups in desalination process, Methyl, Ethyl and a combination of Fluorine and Hydrogen molecules are distributed around the nanopores. In all cases, different number of functional molecules is employed in order to find an optimum distribution of the groups at hand. The results show that an appropriate distribution of Alkyl groups can properly stop the salt... 

Low density turbidity currents have been investigated in a laboratory flume. An Acoustic Doppler Velocimeter (ADV) was used to measure the velocity. The dimensionless velocity profiles were compared with previous studies to check the accuracy of acoustic measuring techniques for turbidity currents. Successful use of the ADV to measure the current velocity has led to interest in the technique of using acoustic sensors to estimate concentrations. Acoustic backscattering analyses are used for estimating the sediment concentration in turbidity currents. With this approach, concentration measurements can be reasonably well represented by a similarity profile. Using this technique, an accurate... 

This paper deals with numerical modeling of water flow which is generated by the break of a dam. The problem is solved by applying a new Incompressible Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (ISPH) algorithm based on projection method. The proposed ISPH model has two steps. In the first step, the incompressibility of fluid is maintained regarding to the changes of intermediate and initial particles densities at the first half-time step (stability step). In the second step, by computing the divergence of the intermediate secondary velocity at the second half-time step (accuracy step), the incompressibility is satisfied completely. In fact, by using this method both stability and accuracy are... 

Non-pumping reactive wells (NPRWs) filled by zero-valent iron (ZVI) can be utilized for the remediation of groundwater contamination of deep aquifers. The efficiency of NPRWs mainly depends on the hydraulic contact time (HCT) of the pollutant with the reactive materials, the extent of the well capture zone (Wcz), and the relative hydraulic conductivity of aquifer and reactive material (Kr). We investigated nitrate removal from groundwater using NPRWs filled by ZVI (in nano and micro scales) and examined the effect of NPRWs orientations (i.e. vertical, slanted, and horizontal) on HCT and Wcz. The dependence of HCT on Wcz for different Kr values was derived theoretically for a homogeneous and... 

Efficient robust control methods are required to keep the boiler-turbine unit performance appropriately. In this paper, a hybrid multivariable robust control strategy including the regulator and observer is designed to improve the performance of an industrial boiler-turbine unit. In the nonlinear model of the process, output variables including the drum pressure, electric power and water level of the drum are controlled at the desired set-points by manipulation of the fuel, steam, and feed-water flow rates. Due to economic and technical reasons and for the estimation of process states, the full-order observer is designed. For disturbance rejection and process stability, a regulator system is... 

The soil permeability coefficient plays a key role in the process of numerical simulation of the liquefaction phenomenon. Liquefaction causes a considerable increase in soil permeability, due to the creation of easier paths for water flow. The work presented in this paper tries to investigate the effects of permeability coefficient on the results of numerical modeling of the liquefaction phenomenon. To do this, a fully coupled (u-P) formulation is employed to analyze soil displacements and pore water pressures. Two different versions of a well-calibrated critical state bounding surface plasticity model, which possesses the capability to utilize a single set of material parameters for a wide... 

Lake Urmia (LU) is the second largest hypersaline lake in the world. Lake Urmia's water level has dropped drastically from 1277.85 m to 1270.08 m a.s.l (equal to 7.77 m) during the last 20 years, equivalent to a loss of 70% of the lake area. The likelihood of lake-groundwater connection on the basin-scale is uncertain and understudied because of lack of basic data and precise information required for physically-based modeling. In this study, cross-correlation analysis is applied on a various time-frames of water level of the lake and groundwater levels (2001–2018) recorded in 797 observation wells across 17 adjacent aquifers. This provides insightful information on the lake-groundwater... 

A novel technique for upscaling of detailed geological reservoir descriptions is presented. The technique aims at reducing both numerical dispersion and homogenization error generated due to incorporating a coarse computational grid and assigning effective permeability to coarse-grid blocks, respectively. In particular, we consider implicit-pressure explicit-saturation scheme where homogenization error impacts the accuracy of the coarse-grid solution of the pressure equation. To reduce the homogenization error, we employ the new vorticity-based gridding that generates a non-uniform coarse grid with high resolution at high vorticity zones. In addition, to control numerical dispersion, we use... 

A Green Element numerical formulation is used to solve the time-dependent nonlinear one-dimensional counter-current spontaneous imbibition diffusion equation in which water enters a water wet rock spontaneously while oil escapes by flowing in the opposite direction. The Green Element Method (GEM) is an element by element approach of the boundary element method. In this new method, by generating large sparse global matrices and yet taking advantage of properties of Green's function, solution of more complicated physical problem is achievable while at the same time much less computational effort is needed rather than boundary element method (BEM). By discretizing both the boundary and problem... 

In order to safe design and optimize performance of industrial systems which work under two phase flow conditions, it's often needed to categorize flow into different regimes. In present work the experiments of two phase flow were done in a large scale test facility with length of 6m and 5cm diameter. Four main flow regimes were observed in vertical air-water two phase flows at moderate superficial velocities of gas and water: Bubbly, Slug, Churn and Annular. Some image processing techniques were used to extract information from each picture. This information include number of bubbles or objects, area, perimeter, height and width of objects (second phase).Also a texture feature extraction... 

Water quality is one of the most important factors contributing to a healthy life. From the water quality management point of view, TDS (total dissolved solids) is the most important factor and many water developing plans have been implemented in recognition of this factor. However, these plans have not been perfect and very successful in overcoming the poor water quality problem, so there are a good volume of related studies in the literature. We study TDS and the water flow of the Karoun river in southwest Iran. We collected the necessary time series data from the Harmaleh station located in the river. We present two Univariate Seasonal Autoregressive Integrated Movement Average (ARIMA)... 

An experimental investigation has been carried out to verify characteristics of pressure fluctuations inside a circular, horizontal and inclined pipeline (90mm inside diameter and 10 m long) carrying two-phase air-water flow in a controlled manner (operating at room temperature and normal pressure). The pressure fluctuation was considered to be due to interaction between the fluid and air bubble compressibility in the pipe. The fluctuating pressure was studied in detail while the flow pattern was mainly slug, wavy or stratified flow. The tests were carried out varying with time, space, water flow rate/air flow rate ratio and pipe inclination. The pressure fluctuations were measured... 

Practical designs of non-aqueous phase liquids (NAPLs) remediation strategies require reliable modeling of interphase mass transfer to predict the retraction of NAPL during processes such as dissolution. In this work, the dissolution process of NAPL during two-phase flow in heterogeneous porous media is studied using pore-network modeling and micromodel experiments. A new physical-experimental approach is proposed to enhance the prediction of the dissolution process during modeling of interphase mass transfer. In this regard, the normalized average resident solute concentration is evaluated for describing the dissolution process at pore-level. To incorporate the effect of medium... 

In this study, a numerical and empirical scheme for increasing cooling tower performance is developed by combining the particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm with a neural network and considering the packing’s compaction as an effective factor for higher accuracies. An experimental setup is used to analyze the effects of packing compaction on the performance. The neural network is optimized by the PSO algorithm in order to predict the precise temperature difference, efficiency, and outlet temperature, which are functions of air flow rate, water flow rate, inlet water temperature, inlet air temperature, inlet air relative humidity, and packing compaction. The effects of water flow rate,... 

In this study, a numerical and empirical scheme for increasing cooling tower performance is developed by combining the particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm with a neural network and considering the packing’s compaction as an effective factor for higher accuracies. An experimental setup is used to analyze the effects of packing compaction on the performance. The neural network is optimized by the PSO algorithm in order to predict the precise temperature difference, efficiency, and outlet temperature, which are functions of air flow rate, water flow rate, inlet water temperature, inlet air temperature, inlet air relative humidity, and packing compaction. The effects of water flow rate,... 

In this study, the flow patterns of air-water, two-phase flows have been investigated experimentally in a vertical mini pipe. The flow regimes were observed by a high speed video recorder in pipes with diameters of 2,3 and 4 mm and length 27, 31 and 25 cm, respectively. The comprehensive visualization of air-water, two-phase flow in a vertical mini pipe has been performed to realize the physics of such a two-phase flow. Different flow patterns of air-water flow were observed simultaneously in the mini pipe at different values of air and water flow rates. Consequently, the flow pattern map was proposed for flow in the mini-pipe, in terms of superficial velocities of liquid and gas phases. The... 

In most of countries, underground waters are the most important sources to provide drinking water. So it is necessary to make scheme and to do high protection of to achieve maximum beneficiary. Necessity of this management is going to be felt by developing these sources and human's interference. However, in the past overtopping phenomenon was the first reason of dam's destruction, but nowadays by increasing of spate design's period, the significant problem that researchers are interfere with, is seepage problem. The purpose of solving the underground problems is to procure height of water as a function of coordinate and time. In observation of practical industries, we can use the...