Sharif Digital Repository

In this paper, a Polymer Electrolyte Membrane (PEM) fuel cell power system including burner, steam reformer, heat exchanger, and water heater has been considered. A PEM fuel cell system is designed to meet the electrical, domestic hot water, heating, and cooling loads of a residential building located in Tehran. Operating conditions of the system with consideration of the electricity cost has been studied. The cost includes social cost of the environmental pollutants (e.g. CO 2, CO and NO). The results show that the maximum energy needs of the building can be met by 12 fuel cell stacks with nominal capacity of 8.5 kW. Annual average electricity cost of thissystem is equal to 0.39 US$/kWh and... 

The use of more efficient energy consuming devices, which are closely associated with reduction of environmental pollution, has gained significant interest in the recent decades. The reduction of drag coefficient also improves safety and durability of environmental structures subjected to high-velocity fluid flow, and causes the noise and vibration to decrease as well. This paper describes the efficiency improvement in energy management by means of reducing drag coefficient in a practical divergent tubular- truncated cone. Extensive numerical simulations with emphasis on the shape optimization study were performed in order to find minimum drag coefficient for both laminar and turbulent flows... 

Increasing concerns about the lack of energy resources, global warming and environmental pollution have pushed the relevant organizations to develop energy saving strategies such as energy labeling programs. In this research, a new energy labeling program is developed and evaluated for the wet cooling towers in Iran. The cooling tower parameters, including its cooling capacity and the fan power consumption, are measured using an experimental setup. The experimental data are standardized to compensate the effect of the ambient wet bulb temperature on the cooling tower performance which cannot be controlled during the experiments. The results show that the cooling tower capacity and the fan... 

In this paper, the effect of wind power generation on power system reliability is investigated. Furthermore, reliability improvement of power system using integrated battery energy storage system and wind farm will be evaluated. Growing demand for electrical energy, gradual diminishing of fossil fuel resources and environmental pollution due to continuous exploitation of them, have led to inevitable change of energy sources in power generation. Due to the random nature of wind speed, the power output of a wind farm is fluctuating; as a result, it does not have a proper control capability. The growing penetration of wind power generation in power system could cause various problems in... 

Increasing concerns about global warming and environmental pollution control has pushed the relevant organizations to set regulations and to develop programs for energy saving. In addition, for many high energy using appliances, energy labeling provides the end user with important data to select energy-efficient equipments and encourage the manufacturers to enhance the performance of their productions. In this research, a new energy-saving program for wet cooling towers has been developed. Considering a thermo-hydraulic analysis, a novel Energy Index (IE) has been extracted which takes all aspects of the problem into account. The present index can be used as a proper criterion for energy... 

Limited fossil resources, daily increasing rate of demand for energy and the environmental pollution fact have made people revert to renewable sources of energy as a solution. One type of renewable energy is offshore wind energy which has high potential without any sound and visual noises. Recently, a lot of researchers have carried out on the issue of offshore wind turbine. Because of incapability of most of software programs to simulate gyroscopic effect of rotating rotors, in this articles a significant effort has been made to fabricate and test an offshore wind turbine under different rotor rotation velocities and different heading angle of wind so as to obtain the effects of these... 

E-waste has become one of the greatest sources of environmental pollution. Bioleaching is known as a new, simple, and environmentally friendly technology for metal recovery requiring low energy input, unskilled labor operations, moderate conditions, and low costs. Acidithiobacillus ferrooxidans is a famous and puissant mesophilic bacterium applied extensively to recover metals from ores and different industrial and municipal wastes. It is necessary to identify the parameters affecting consumers E-waste recycling. Separating and recovering different types of E-waste is impossible for small recycling units. There should be a specific combination of E-waste, enabling the extraction of the... 

Hexagonal core–shell SiO2[–MOYI]Cl–]Ag nanoframeworks were synthesized via surface modification of hexagonal silica nanoparticles prepared from perlite (EP) as a cheap and abundant raw material. The prepared samples were well characterized by X-ray diffraction powder (XRD), energy dispersive X-ray (EDX), diffuse reflectance spectroscopy (DRS), Brunauer–Emmett–Teller (BET) specific surface area analysis, fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDX), and transmission electron microscopy (TEM). The XRD patterns confirmed that Ag and AgCl crystalline phases were successfully loaded on the surface. The TEM images were also implied that the... 

Activated carbon (AC) is an inert adsorbent material that has widely been used in water treatment or removing of environmental pollutants from water. In order to improve the adsorption of AC, which highly depends on its pore size and surface area, we prepared highly porous adsorbent composites of activated carbon (AC)/chromium-based MOF (MIL-101(Cr)). The composite has a high specific surface area of 2440 m2 g−1 and total pore volume of 1.27 cm3 g−1. To show the efficiency of the composite as an adsorbent, the removal kinetics of anionic dyes (Direct Red 31 and Acid Blue 92) from aqueous solutions dependent on the amount of composite, adsorption time, concentration of dye and pH is... 

Environmental pollutions with heavy metals pose serious health and ecological risks. Sabzevar in the northeast of Iran has natural chromic mines and then chromium-polluted soils and groundwater. In the present work, the metal-tolerant bacterial strain KR2 was identified as Shewanella sp. following 16S rDNA gene sequence analysis. Bioremediation ability of isolated bacterial from agricultural soils that irrigated by groundwater, Shewanella sp., was evaluated for uptaking of chromium with varying Cr(VI) concentrations from 50 to 500 ppm in aerobic conditions (pH 7.0, 37 °C). The Shewanella sp. strain KR2 showed an obvious heavy metal tolerant in the wide range of heavy metals including: Cr6+,... 

Municipal wastewater treatment facilities produce a lot of sludge which is concentrated with different pollutants. The sustainable design of the sludge disposal alternatives is of crucial importance for touristic cities like Mashhad in Iran. Increasing sludge generation and its accumulation in the city and more stringent legislations highlight the challenge of sludge disposal, recently. This study compares different alternatives to reach maximum possible environmental benefits as well as the most cost-effective technologies. In this study, life cycle analysis (LCA) assesses different scenarios for disposal of sewage sludge which is aerobically treated and dewatered for two real case studies.... 

Hydrogen and syngas, as two effective clean fuels, have a considerable stake in the global fuel market. These are dominantly produced from fossil fuels through reforming processes, which lose a large amount of energy and emit numerous amounts of CO2. Bio-renewable glycerol steam reforming is an attractive alternative to traditional reforming for reducing the dependence on hydrocarbon resources and mitigating climate change. This research aims to manage a heat-integrated reactor with three concentric cylinders, containing exothermic-side (methane tri-reforming), endothermic-side (glycerol steam reforming), and permeation-side for co-production of pure hydrogen and syngas. In this process,... 

Laboratory investigation on the influence of solute concentration on the soil water-retention curve (SWRC) and volumetric behaviour of expansive soils has received much attention in recent years due to increasing environmental pollution. However, most studies only considered applying wetting or drying path with almost no attention to hydraulic hysteresis. Furthermore, these studies have focused on examining expansive soils and only marginal effort has been devoted to collapsible soils. Therefore, the main objective of this study is to systematically explore the SWRC and shrinkage characteristics of an artificially made collapsible soil at various molar concentrations. The tests were... 

In advanced combined-cycle power plants, significant improvements in the thermodynamic performance are mainly achieved by the development of more efficient gas-turbine systems. This paper evaluates the effect of selected decision variables in the steam system for optimization of Thermal Combined Cycle Gas Turbine (TCCGT) power plant using an iterative exergoeconomic. The design variables were the thermodynamic parameters that establish the configuration both of the steam and gas systems. The design data of an existing plant (Damavand power plant in Tehran-Iran) is used. Two different objective functions are proposed: one minimizes the total cost of production per unit of output, and the... 

Functionally graded cemented carbonitrides (FGCCs) are applied in cutting tools industry. Indexable inserts made from mentioned alloys have superior cutting performance and tool life thanks the formation of a surface modified layer with enhanced properties as well as crater wear resistance. Cemented carbonitrides are made of hard carbide/nitride/carbonitride particles that have been embedded in a metallic binder. Excellent wetting ability of tungsten carbide with cobalt has made this metal the first choice as binder. However, cobalt has high cost and environmental pollution impacts. Substitution of cobalt with other metals has always been figured out. Some other metals that have been used as...