Sharif Digital Repository

Partial discharge (PD) signals generated by defects in a transformer insulation can be captured through measurement instruments and they may be used, after preprocessing, to discriminate the PD Sources. Some of the artificial defect models, such as: corona, internal cavity and surface discharge in air are developed in the laboratory. These defect models are put in parallel under a high voltage stress. The PD signals stemmed from these sets of multiple PD sources are captured. In this paper six bandpass Alters (with two MPD 600 devices) are used for feature extraction of these signals. For PD signals discrimination, the Density-Based Spatial Clustering of Applications with Noise density... 

A variable air volume (VAV) air handling system can significantly reduce fan power under partial load conditions. The focus of this study is developing a modeling program to predict the potential energy saving by the secondary HVAC system strategies. Comprehensive steady-state models are established to describe the energy performance of different control strategies for secondary HVAC systems. With building loads, minimum fresh air flow rate, pressure losses, supply air temperature control, dampers control and coil characteristic as inputs, the objectives were to develop a simulation model to evaluate performance of an air handling system. The potential energy savings of constant air volume... 

Thin porous membranes are important components in a microfluidic device, serving as separators, filters, and scaffolds for cell culture. However, the fabrication and the integration of these membranes possess many challenges, which restrict their widespread applications. This paper reports a facile technique to fabricate robust membrane-embedded microfluidic devices. We integrated an electrospun membrane into a polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) device using the simple plasma-activated bonding technique. To increase the flexibility of the membrane and to address the leakage problem, the electrospun membrane was fabricated with the highest weight ratio of PDMS to polymethylmethacrylate (i.e., 6:1... 

Nowadays position sensors are increasingly used in many applications. One of the most commonly used sensors are resolvers. There are different types of resolvers including Wound Rotor (WR) resolvers, Variable Air-gap Length Variable Reluctance (VAGL-VR) resolvers, and Sinusoidal Rotor Variable Reluctance (SR-VR) resolvers. Regardless of the resolvers’ configurations, including linear, cylindrical and disk type, finite element analysis (FEA) is inseparable part of design and performance evaluation of these magnetic sensors. The scope of this study is to discuss challenges in the FEA of resolvers. The influence of mesh quality, time steps, stop time, excitation methods including volt-age... 

In obstetrics, fetal heart rate (FHR) detection remains the standard for intrapartum assessment of fetal well-being. In this paper, a low-power (<55 mW) optical technique is proposed for transabdominal FHR detection using near-infrared photoplesthys-mography (PPG). A beam of IR-LED (890 nm) propagates through to the maternal abdomen and fetal tissues, resulting in a mixed signal detected by a low-noise detector situated at a distance of 4 cm. Low-noise amplification and 24-bit analog-to-digital converter resolution ensure minimum effect of quantization noise. After synchronous detection, the mixed signal is processed by an adaptive filter to extract the fetal signal, whereas the PPG from the... 

In this study, clustering based method for activation detection in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is employed. Moreover, some features are obtained by fitting two models namely FIR filter and Gamma function, to hemodynamic response function (HRF). After applying clustering methods (that require number of clusters as an input) to feature space, our simulations show that number of clusters can affect activation detection significantly. Therefore a newly proposed clustering algorithm namely evolving neural gas (ENG) that gives optimal number of clusters is exploited. In addition to ENG, the result of four clustering algorithms namely k-means, fuzzy C-means, neural gas, and clara... 

Single event upsets (SEUs) and single event transients (SETs) are major reliability concerns in deep submicron technologies. As technology feature size shrinks, digital circuits are becoming more susceptible to SEUs and SETs. A novel SEU/SET-tolerant latch called feedback redundant SEU/SET-tolerant latch (FERST) is presented, where redundant feedback lines are used to mask SEUs and delay elements are used to filter SETs. Detailed SPICE simulations have been done to evaluate the proposed design and compare it with previous latch designs. The results show that the SEU tolerance of the FERST latch is almost equal to that of a TMR latch (a widely used latch which is the most reliable among the... 

In this study, a new passive method suitable for geolocating low probability of intercept (LPI) radars is introduced. The method uses two electronic support receivers placed on a fast moving platform (e.g., an airplane or a satellite). The proposed method has a high processing gain, which makes it highly suitable for very weak LPI signals. The method processing gain was analytically derived and illustrated with simulation to determine if the proposed method can detect LPI radars in much lower SNRs compared to regular time-frequency LPI detection methods. Also, the resolution of the proposed method in both range and cross-range directions in radar location finding was analyzed. The results... 

The problem of joint estimation of the state and input in linear time-invariant dynamical systems is revisited proposing novel sequential Bayesian formulations. An appealing feature of the proposed method is the promise it delivers for updating the covariance matrices of the process and measurement noise in a real-time fashion using asymptotic approximations. The proposed method avoids the direct transmission of the input into predictions of the state using a zero-mean Gaussian distribution for the input. This prior distribution aims to eliminate low-frequency drifts from estimations of the state and input. Moreover, the method is outlined in a computational algorithm offering real-time... 

Elimination of the surface acoustic wave (SAW) filter from the input of a receiver can render it extremely vulnerable to various blockers and interferers. The presence of large out-of-band (OOB) blockers will result in the required linearity of the SAW-less receiver to be considerably higher than that of the conventional receivers with the input SAW filter. The ever-present undesirable signals that arise in the absence of the input SAW filter can be divided into two classes of far and near OOB blockers and interferers. Removal of these harmful signals requires two distinct approaches according to their nature. Two different methods for blocker and interferer rejection are introduced in this... 

Nowadays, position sensors are increasingly used in many applications. One of the most commonly used sensors are resolvers. There are different types of resolvers including wound rotor resolvers, variable air-gap length variable reluctance resolvers, and sinusoidal rotor variable reluctance resolvers. Regardless of the resolvers' configurations, including linear, cylindrical and disk type, finite element analysis (FEA) is inseparable part of design and the performance evaluation of these magnetic sensors. The scope of this study is to discuss challenges in the FEA of resolvers. The influence of mesh quality, time steps, stop time, excitation methods including voltage source and current... 

Short-circuit fault (SCF) detection is mandatory in a high voltage DC power supply (HVPS) to prevent fatal damage. The majority of converters employ a single sensor to detect the SCF. This attribute increases the interference vulnerability of the fault detection (FD) system in the presence of noise. Therefore, miss detections and false alarms are possible to occur. Miss detections and false alarms are harmful catastrophes in most applications. A commonly used method to suppress the noise impacts is using a low-bandwidth low-pass filter. However, the use of the low-bandwidth low-pass filter reduces the speed of FD due to the filter delay. This paper proposes a fast FD algorithm based on... 

Vacuum tubes are widely used for various applications. These vacuum tubes are supplied by high voltage power supplies. The amount of delivered energy from the high voltage power supply to the vacuum tube is an important issue during the vacuum arc in the tube. The protection mechanism consists of a shunt crowbar which diverts the fault current from the tube to itself as a parallel path. Detection of the vacuum arc is crucial and only one sensor is usually employed to detect the vacuum arc. This characteristic intensifies the interference susceptibility of the vacuum arc diagnosis system in a noisy environment. As a result of the noise, the arc detection system can report false alarms. False... 

Among position sensors, resolvers are superior from reliability point of view. However, obtaining lower output voltage harmonics and simple manufacturing process is a challenge in the design and optimization of resolvers. In this paper, a metaheuristic optimization algorithm is used to minimize total harmonic distortion of the output signals, and consequently the estimated position error in concentrated coil wound field resolvers. Meanwhile, to minimize total coil numbers, manufacturing costs, and complexity of the winding process, modified objective function and constraints are proposed. In this way, a modified winding function method is employed for performance analysis of the axial flux... 

An integrated guidance and control (IGC) is designed in this study for a surface-to-air missile considering burned or broken fin as a fault. The IGC model in the pitch plane is developed with various uncertainties in the presence of fin failure. The considered fault may cause a change in the vehicle’s shape that leads to a change in aerodynamic coefficients and consequently in the model. To identify the new model, aerodynamic coefficients are estimated using an estimator and the result is sent to the controller. Then, an adaptive robust controller is designed using the combination of backstepping and sliding mode scheme to compensate fin failure and changes in the dynamic. The simulation... 

Vacuum arc is one of the most important failure factors of the vacuum tubes. The amount of delivered energy from the high-voltage dc power supply to the vacuum tube is an important issue during the vacuum arc in the tube. Vacuum arc acts as a short-circuit fault (SCF) at the power supply output. The majority of converters use a single current sensor to measure only the converter output current for detecting the SCF. However, the sensor may provide unreliable data because of the noise effect. Application of a low-pass filter reduces the noise effect. Regarding the delay of the low-pass filter, the interval of arc detection increases and more energy is delivered to the tube. In this article, a... 

Our aim is to improve the switching performance of the graphene nanoribbon field-effect transistors (GNRFETs), exploiting the concept of energy filtering. Within the proposed scheme, a superlattice (SL) structure is used in the source of the transistor for filtering high-energy electron tail by engineering the density of states (DOS). According to simulation results, this can significantly decrease the OFF-current and the subthreshold swing (SS). A comparison of the proposed device with a conventional GNRFET and a graphene nanoribbon (GNR) tunneling field-effect transistor (GNRTFET) demonstrates a significant improvement. Therefore, a typical SL-GNRFET can reduce the average and the minimum... 

Underwater navigation is generally accomplished through the data fusion of INS (Inertial Navigation System) and auxiliary sensors such as DVL (Doppler Velocity Logger) sensor. However, because of the possibility of DVL outage, alternative low-cost solutions are attractive. Among these, one is using vehicle kinetic model information extracted by the Newton-Euler equation to improve INS performance, which is called model-aided navigation. In this paper, only the vehicle translational motion dynamics are used to replace DVL in underwater navigation in DVL outage. The vehicle 3D translational dynamics has been obtained by using general Newton-Euler equations. Integrating these dynamics leads to... 

Energy use in buildings contributes a large part in global energy demand. To reduce energy use in this group of consumers, specially in cold seasons, an automatic control technique is proposed. In this paper, a model predictive controller (MPC) is employed to minimize the boiler activation time. The method uses the building model and incorporates the weather forecast data to act on the actuator in an optimal fashion while treating the user comfort constraints. This technique, as a part, can be embedded into the building energy management system. The building model parameters are obtained via an online identification process using unscented kalman filter (UKF). This identification is... 

Increase of nonlinear loads in industries has resulted in high levels of harmonic currents and consequently harmonic voltages in power networks. Harmonics have several negative effects such as higher energy losses and equipment life reduction. To reduce the levels of harmonics in power networks, different methods of harmonic suppression have been employed. The basic idea in all of these methods is to prevent harmonics from flowing into a power network at customer sides and the point of common coupling (PCC). Due to the costs, none of the existing mitigating methods result in a harmonic-free power system. The remaining harmonic currents, which rotate in a power network according to the system...