Sharif Digital Repository

This paper discusses a novel and detailed approach for dynamic modeling and control design of a coupled hydraulic dynamometer/turbine-engine system. This study presents a comprehensive model to reveal the coupling effects and an adaptive multiobjective controller to ensure a safe and reliable operation. A fuzzy-based strategy is employed to dynamically adjust the controller gains to keep the state variables and power loading within the desirable operational limits. This approach uses the dynamometer inlet, outlet, and trim valves as well as the turbine fuel flow rate and bleed valve in order to control the system performance during the engine testing process. The proposed fuzzy control... 

We present a model of fractures based on the idea that the elastic free energy due to the fracture density follows a Boltzmann distribution. The resulting expression for the spatial correlation in the displacement of fractures is used as an objective function in a simulated annealing algorithm to generate realizations of correlated fracture networks. This approach determines the appropriate statistical distribution for the fractures (e.g., length distribution) rather than imposing them as is done conventionally. The model consists of two families of parallel fractures which are perpendicular under isotropic conditions. There also exists a positive correlation between the position of... 

The purpose of this study is to evaluate an anaerobic system (ABR) cultured by chemoautotrophic bacteria for biodesulfurization of natural gas. In this study anaerobic baffled reactor with five compartments and active volume of 10 l was used. For increasing solid retention time, reactor was packed by pumice with 0.5-2 cm diameter which active volume decreased to 9 l. Inoculation was performed by activated sludge from municipal sewage treatment, which was kept in anaerobic condition for 1 year. The synthetic wastewater which contains S2O32- ion was used in start-up and S -2 for running of ABR. Performance of the reactor was evaluated at three equivalent hydraulic retention times (HRT) of 50,... 

Free surface flows are frequently encountered in hydraulic engineering problems including water jets, weirs and around gates. An iterative solution to the incompressible two-dimensional vertical steady Navier-Stokes equations, comprising momentum and continuity equations, is used to solve for the priori unknown free surface, the velocity and the pressure fields. The entire water body is covered by a unstructured finite element grid which is locally refined. The dynamic boundary condition is imposed for the free surface where the pressure vanishes. This procedure is done continuously until the normal velocities components vanish. To overcome numerical errors and oscillations encountering in... 

Film cooling of surfaces appears in many applications. For instance, it is one of the most effective methods to improve the efficiency of gas turbines. As a fundamental study, two different types of film cooling (slot and discrete holes injections) are numerically simulated here. A flat surface is used to model a small portion of a gas turbine blade. Incompressible, stationary, viscous, turbulent flow is assumed using the STAR-CD software with the standard k-ε model and a cell-centered finite volume method on a nonuniform structured grid. The jet flow Reynolds number, based on the jet's hydraulic diameter, is 4.7 × 103. The study of the injection angle and the velocity ratio shows that the... 

The removal performance of total poly phenols and orthodiphenols (o-diphenols) content in olive mill waste (OMW) was investigated with a three stages cross flow laboratory scale rotating biological contactor (RBC) in the present study. Due to high COD and other pollutant existed in the original OMW, before biological treatment of OMW by the RBC system, physico-chemical treatment was effected for COD and other pollutant reduction. Inoculation of RBC was effected by sludge from olive oil factory, and microbial acclimation was continued to 49 days and the system was adapted to about 300ppm of OMW poly phenols and o-diphenols. In biological treatment, effect of operating parameters such as... 

In this paper, a mesh-less numerical approach is utilized to solve Euler's equation that is the governing equation of the irrotational flow of ideal fluids. A fractional step method of discritization is applied which consists to split each time step in two steps. This numerical method is based on moving-particle semi-implicit method (MPS) for simulating incompressible inviscid flows with free surfaces. The motion of each particle is calculated through interactions with neighboring particles covered with the kernel function. There are limitations for getting a stable solution by MPS method. In this paper, various kernel functions are considered and applied to improve the stability of MPS... 

The effect of up velocity and influent COD concentration on the activity of sulphate-reducing bacteria (SRB) in UASB reactors is discussed. To study these effects, four UASB reactors were built and utilized in parallel. Examinations were carried out in two different concentrations of molasses (500 mg COD/l and 1000 mg COD/l) and four different upward flow velocities. It was observed that at velocities greater than 1 m/h, SRB bacteria were easily washed out from the reactors due to lower density and lack of ability to form dense and firm granules. It was found that in low-strength wastewaters with a COD to sulphate ratio of 2, an upward velocity in the range of 1.5-2.5 m/h could be... 

Purpose - Aims to describe design, prototyping and characteristics of a pole climbing/manipulating robot with ability of passing bends and branches of the pole. Design/methodology/approach - Introducing a hybrid (parallel/serial) four degree of freedom (DOF) mechanism as the main part of the robot and also introduces a unique gripper design for pole climbing robots. Findings - Finds that a robot, with the ability of climbing and manipulating on poles with bends and branches, needs at least 4 DOFs. Also an electrical cylinder is a good option for climbing robots and has some advantages over pneumatic or hydraulic cylinders. Research limitations/implications - The robot is semi-industrial... 

This paper presents an overview of a study on the design and analysis aspects of the Lake Urmia Bridge in Iran. For years there have been several detailed investigations on this subject. Here, these alternatives are discussed and, then, results of analyses for a proposed solution, a floating bridge, are presented. These aspects include environmental loads, structure and the mooring system. © Sharif University of Technology  

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to apply a hybrid neuro-fuzzy paradigm called self-organizing neuro-fuzzy multilayered classifier (SONeFMUC) to classify the operating faults of a hydraulic system. The main motivation behind the use of SONeFMUC is to attest the capabilities of neuro-fuzzy classifier for handling the difficulties associated with fault diagnosis of hydraulic circuits. Design/methodology/approach: In the proposed methodology, first, the neuro-fuzzy nodes at each layer of the SONeFMUC are trained separately using two well-known bio-inspired algorithms, i.e. a semi deterministic method with random walks called co-variance matrix adaptation evolutionary strategy (CMA-ES) and... 

In this paper, the crack growth simulation is presented in saturated porous media using the extended finite element method. The mass balance equation of fluid phase and the momentum balance of bulk and fluid phases are employed to obtain the fully coupled set of equations in the framework of u - p formulation. The fluid flow within the fracture is modeled using the Darcy law, in which the fracture permeability is assumed according to the well-known cubic law. The spatial discritization is performed using the extended finite element method, the time domain discritization is performed based on the generalized Newmark scheme, and the non-linear system of equations is solved using the... 

The hydraulic efficiency of sedimentation basins is reduced by short-circuiting, circulation zones and bottom particleladen jets. Baffles are used to improve the sediment tank performance. In this study, laboratory experiments were used to examine the hydrodynamics of several baffle configurations. An accompanying numerical analysis was performed based on the 2-D Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes equations along with the k-ε turbulence closure model. The numerical model was supplemented with the volume-of-fluid technique, and the advection-diffusion equation to simulate the dynamics of particle-laden flow. Model predictions compared well with the experimental data. An empirical function was... 

Accurate estimation of scour depth is needed for economic and safe determination of bridge pier foundation depth. Most design criteria are based on maximum scour depth due to the steady design discharge without flow time limit. In this paper, the results are presented of an experimental investigation on local scouring around a single bridge pier under steady and unsteady flow regimes. For unsteady flow, triangular shape hydrographs with repeatable peaks have been chosen. Results show that both sharp and flat increases to the peak of hydrographs have a negligible effect on scour depth for the same base time. An equation is obtained to compute the scour depth due to a specific triangular... 

A control strategy on a hybrid vehicle can be implemented through different methods. In this paper, the Cerebellar Model Articulation Controller (CMAC) and Radial Basis Function (RBF) neural networks were applied to develop an optimal control strategy for a split parallel hydraulic hybrid vehicle. These networks contain a nonlinear mapping, and, also, the fast learning procedure has made them desirable for online control. The RBF network was constructed with the use of the K-mean clustering method, and the CMAC network was investigated for different association factors. Results show that the binary CMAC has better performance over the RBF network. Also, the hybridization of the vehicle... 

Side weirs are frequently used in many water projects. Due to their position with respect to the flow direction, side weirs are categorized as plain, oblique and labyrinth. One of the advantages of an oblique side weir is the increase in the effective length of the weir for overflowing and, therefore, diverting more discharge with the same channel opening, weir height and flow properties (i.e., upstream discharge, upstream Froude number and so on). In this paper, an experimental set-up of a new design of an oblique side weir with asymmetric geometry has been studied. The hydraulic behavior of this kind of oblique side weir, with a constant opening length, different weir heights and...