Sharif Digital Repository

Application of solar energy compared to conventional gas-burning boilers for steam generation in thermal Enhanced Oil Recovery processes is a newly attended technology, which brings significant benefits to the petroleum industry through environmental and economical aspects. This technique is especially designed for the regions in which gas-burning steam generation is not viable in large scale. The objective of this study is to investigate about viability of using solar energy to generate steam instead of using conventional steam generators in a Venezuelan extra heavy oil reservoir. Limited gas production policy of the Venezuelan government is the major challenge for utilizing gas steam... 

In the present paper, conceptual duct shape design for kinetic energy extraction with hydrokinetic turbines is discussed. The goal is to find a single-passage axisymmetric geometry that holds stable flow with maximum kinetic energy flux at duct throat. For finding the optimum duct shape, the fluid flow was numerically simulated in a wedge shaped space with Flow-Simulation Software. In a multi-stage conceptual design, tabulated configurations were employed to study each geometrical characteristic separately. These include curvature of profile camber, trailing edge shape, profile tip shape, and duct exit cross sectional area. The revolved profile of each duct consists of a well constrained... 

In this research, the effect of alternative fuels and the inlet charged air temperature is numerically investigated on the performance of a turbocharged spark-ignition engine. For this purpose, a one-dimensional engine and turbocharger model is created in an engine simulation and performance analysis software and validated with former experimental results. Then, the model is run with four fuel types, including two gasoline types with different octane numbers and two ethanol–gasoline blend fuels—E25 and E85. In each case, the inlet charged air temperature is changed from cold to hot condition and performance characteristics such as the spark advance timing, brake torque, brake-specific fuel... 

The attitude fault-tolerant control of a flexible satellite actuated by reaction wheels and magnetic torquer bars is investigated in this article. A low earth orbit is considered for moment perturbations such as drag and gravity gradient. Furthermore, the flexible panels attached to a rigid central body are modeled through the assumed mode approach by a finite set of bending modal motion. The ordinary differential equations of their generalized coordinates are found using Lagrange’s equation, and the resulting dynamical model is validated by comparing its simulation results to the NX Siemens software results. Finally, a fault-tolerant controller based on sliding mode control is suggested and... 

The attitude fault-tolerant control of a flexible satellite actuated by reaction wheels and magnetic torquer bars is investigated in this article. A low earth orbit is considered for moment perturbations such as drag and gravity gradient. Furthermore, the flexible panels attached to a rigid central body are modeled through the assumed mode approach by a finite set of bending modal motion. The ordinary differential equations of their generalized coordinates are found using Lagrange’s equation, and the resulting dynamical model is validated by comparing its simulation results to the NX Siemens software results. Finally, a fault-tolerant controller based on sliding mode control is suggested and... 

To determine the curvature of the exit profile in the extrusion process of non-symmetrical flat dies, the dead metal zone profile was predicted using the energy minimization method. The dead zone is a natural non-linear die for the process and it is pragmatic to use this non-linear die to estimate the value of the exit profile curvature and the required bearing length for reducing this deviation. The velocity field is calculated based on Hermite cubic spline and some additional assumptions. In non-symmetrical dies the entrance section of the deformation region is not flat. Considering this fact, axial velocity decreases with increasing the distance to die center line which is in agreement... 

A nonlinear inverse finite element method is developed for estimation of initial blank shape and strain distribution in final shape. This method often based on implicit static algorithms, causes sometimes convergence problems because of strong nonlinearities. In order to avoid the converging problems, especially in the quasi vertical walls, an appropriate initial guess is introduced. By using this initial guess, the number of iterations in the nonlinear numerical solution is decreased, solution speed is significantly increased and complicated geometries can be analyzed by this method with good accuracy. Application to a Srail part shows good agreement between commercially available finite... 

In this study nickel ferrite magnetic nanoparticles were applied as an efficient and reusable catalyst in the four-component synthesis of substituted pyrroles under neat conditions. The reaction was conducted using various amounts of catalyst at different temperatures and finally, application of 5 mol% of catalyst at 100 °C was determined as the optimum reaction condition. Results showed that nickel ferrite nanoparticles could catalyze the reaction at relatively short times (3-4 h) with high to excellent yields (70-96%). The catalyst could be recovered easily using an external magnetic field and reused nine times without any significant activity lost  

In this paper, the behavior and performance of a new type of bracing system called Hat Knee Bracing (HKB) is investigated in low-rise multistory steel structures. This novel form of resistant system, which provides reasonable stiffness in moderate earthquakes, consists of a V shaped knee member connected to mid span of the beam and the brace members. In this research work, the "FEMA P695 evaluation method" is utilized in order to explore the nonlinear behavior of the HKB frame, and quantification of three seismic performance factors: Response Modification Factor, Over-strength Factor, and Deflection Amplification Factor. The seismic response simulation of archetype frames is performed using... 

The quality of an architectural design of a software system has a great influence on achieving non-functional requirements of a system. A regular software development project is often influenced by non-functional factors such as the customers' expectations about the performance and reliability of the software as well as the reduction of underlying risks. The evaluation of non- functional parameters of a software system at the early stages of design and its development process are often considered as major factors in dealing with these issues. Because these evaluations can help us to choose the most proper model which is the securest and the most reliable.In this paper, a method is presented... 

The increase in complexity and rate of technological changes in modern software development has led to a demand for systematic methods that raise the abstraction level for system maintenance and regression testing. Model-driven development (MDD) has promised to reduce extra coding efforts in software maintenance activities using traceable change management. The research described in this paper presents a Z-notation-based framework, called delta-based regression testing (DbRT), for formal modeling of regression testing in the context of MDD. The framework proposes to propagate the changes from a software specification to testing artifacts in order to preserve consistency after system... 

Microservices architectures are becoming the defacto standard for building continuously deployed systems. At the same time, there is a substantial growth in the demand for migrating on-premise legacy applications to the cloud. In this context, organizations tend to migrate their traditional architectures into cloud-native architectures using microservices. This article reports a set of migration and rearchitecting design patterns that we have empirically identified and collected from industrial-scale software migration projects. These migration patterns can help information technology organizations plan their migration projects toward microservices more efficiently and effectively. In... 

Emergence of instrumentation frameworks has vastly contributed to the software engineering practices. As the instrumentation use cases become more complex, complexity of instrumenting programs also increases, leading to a higher risk of software defects, increased development time, and decreased maintainability. In security applications such as symbolic execution and taint analysis, which need to instrument a large number of instruction types, this complexity is prominent. This paper presents an architecture based on the Pin binary instrumentation framework to abstract the low-level OS and hardware-dependent implementation details, facilitate code reuse in heavyweight instrumentation use... 

The buoyancy-induced turbulent flows in complex geometries with internal heat source have important application in enclosure fire dynamics, for example, smoke movement in the situation of fire in tunnels. The majority of computational works studying the fire-induced hot air movement in such cases use a Cartesian coordinate system. Hence, to simulate curved geometries, the Cartesian grid should be refined so that it comparatively matches the geometry. In the present work, a three-dimensional numerical method using nonorthogonal curvilinear coordinate system was developed. Numerical simulations were performed to study the flow structures and the heat transfer characteristics of fire-induced... 

Power transformer inner insulation system is a very critical component. Its degradation may pose apparatus to fail while in service. On the other hand, experimental experiences prove that partial discharges are a major source of insulation failure in power transformers. If the deterioration of the insulation system caused by PD activity can be detected at an early stage, preventive maintenance measures may be taken. Because of the complex structure of the transformer, accurate PD location is difficult and is one of the challenges power utilities are faced with. This problem comes to be vital in open access systems. In this paper a theory for locating partial discharge and its propagation... 

Many-core processors facilitate coarse-grained reliability by exploiting available cores for redundant multithreading. However, ensuring high reliability with reduced power consumption necessitates joint considerations of variations in vulnerability, performance and power properties of software as well as the underlying hardware. In this paper, we propose a power-efficient reliability management system for many-core processors. It exploits various basic redundancy techniques (like, dual and triple modular redundancy) operating in different voltage-frequency levels, each offering distinct reliability, performance and power properties. Our system performs Dynamic Redundancy and Voltage Scaling... 

During the past decade, Electro-Hydraulic system has performed a significant role in industrial engineering as an actuator for high performance and precision positioning applications. In this case, many control methods have been developed for an electro-hydraulic actuated clutch. In this paper a Linear Quadratic Regulators (LQR) is proposed to trajectory control of a wet clutch actuated by a hydraulic servo valve mechanism. Simulation study was performed using linearized mathematical model of the system implemented in MATLAB software. Based on the simulation results performance of the proposed controller was evaluated and discussed  

Network on Chip (NoC) is the most common interconnection platform for multiprocessor systems-on-chips (MPSoCs). In order to explore the design space of this platform, we need a high-speed, cycle-accurate, and flexible simulation tool. In this paper, we present AdapNoC, a configurable cycle-accurate FPGA-based NoC simulator, which can be configured via software. A wide range of parameters are configurable in FPGA side of the proposed simulator, and the software side is implemented on an embedded soft-core processor. We transfer some parts of simulator, such as Traffic Generators (TGs) and Traffic Receptors (TRs), to software side without any degradation in simulation speed. Moreover, we... 

Nowadays MapReduce and its open source implementation, Apache Hadoop, are the most widespread solutions for handling massive dataset on clusters of commodity hardware. At the expense of a somewhat reduced performance in comparison to HPC technologies, the MapReduce framework provides fault tolerance and automatic parallelization without any efforts by developers. Since in many cases Hadoop is adopted to support business critical activities, it is often important to predict with fair confidence the execution time of submitted jobs, for instance when SLAs are established with end-users. In this work, we propose and validate a hybrid approach exploiting both queuing networks and support vector... 

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is one of the most significant and fastest growing fields in cloud computing. To efficiently use the resources of an IaaS cloud, several important factors such as performance, availability, and power consumption need to be considered and evaluated carefully. Evaluation of these metrics is essential for cost-benefit prediction and quantification of different strategies which can be applied to cloud management. In this paper, analytical models based on Stochastic Reward Nets (SRNs) are proposed to model and evaluate an IaaS cloud system at different levels. To achieve this, an SRN is initially presented to model a group of physical machines which are...