Sharif Digital Repository

This article contributes to the ongoing debate about whether, how, and under what conditions latecomer countries can become producers of new technology and innovation, thereby catching up with technological leaders. Recent work on sectoral systems of innovation and in the evolutionary economics literature suggests that successful latecomers can move into new technological or industrial domains. They specialise in domains that present more frequent windows of opportunity, shorter technological cycles, flatter learning curves and easier access to relevant knowledge than others. This study investigates the role and significance of two hitherto neglected dimensions of technological regimes that... 

The performance is presented of the reconstruction and identification algorithms for electrons and photons with the CMS experiment at the LHC. The reported results are based on proton-proton collision data collected at a center-of-mass energy of 13 TeV and recorded in 2016-2018, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 136 fb-1. Results obtained from lead-lead collision data collected at √sNN=5.02 TeV are also presented. Innovative techniques are used to reconstruct the electron and photon signals in the detector and to optimize the energy resolution. Events with electrons and photons in the final state are used to measure the energy resolution and energy scale uncertainty in the... 

The present article aims to investigate the cause-and-effect relationship between the employees’ psychological empowerment (PE) and dimensions of knowledge management (KM) in an oil company, using the fuzzy decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory method. The study population consists of oil company experts. The sample size is determined based on the theoretical saturation limit. The present findings show that PE is the strongest causative factor with significant effects on knowledge creation (KC) and knowledge dissemination (KD). Among the KM dimensions, the most influential factors are the dimensions of KC, knowledge application, and knowledge capture (KCA). Of all KM dimensions,... 

Despite the importance of well-being, few studies have been conducted on the relationship between well-being and technology. In this paper, the development of technology from the perspective of well-being studies are divided into three generations. In higher generations, the main criterion of technology development becomes more comprehensive, in order to decrease the side effects of technology. We introduce the fourth generation in which well-being is the main criterion of the design process. Although it may not seem necessary to say that the purpose of most technologies is implicitly well-being, we show that the domination of physical pleasure in terms of “use and convenience” in the modern... 

There has been a multitude of techniques proposed for identifying vulnerabilities in software. Forcing a program into a vulnerable state has become increasingly unscalable, given the size of the programs and the number of possible execution states. At the same time, techniques that are looking for vulnerability signatures are marred with weak and incomplete signatures. This is not to say that such techniques have failed to identify previously unknown vulnerabilities in the code. However, they have inherent weaknesses, which result in identifying vulnerabilities that are limited in type and complexity. We propose a novel technique to extract succinct vulnerability-relevant statements... 

Contact wires are critical components of railway overhead infrastructure which provide power for trains. This paper proposes an innovative method to determine the service life of worn contact wires under three failure modes: tension, fatigue, and attrition. The tensile stress, fatigue damage, and cross-section loss of contact wire have been modelled as stochastic processes following lognormal distribution. The first-passage probability method is then used to determine the time-dependent failure probability for contact wires under each failure mode. The service life of the contact wire is determined through system reliability analysis. This method has then been applied to a case study to... 

The purpose of this study is to apply managerial economics and methods of decision analysis to study the optimal pattern of innovation activities for development of new energy technologies in developing countries. For this purpose, a model of energy research and development (R&D) planning is developed and it is then linked to a bottom-up energy-systems model. The set of interlinked models provide a comprehensive analytical tool for assessment of energy technologies and innovation planning taking into account the specific conditions of developing countries. An energy-system model is used as a tool for the assessment and prioritization of new energy technologies. Based on the results of the... 

The paper presents further experiments with an extended version of a comprehensive model for assessment of energy technologies and research and development (R&D) planning to evaluate the impact of innovation programs on development of Iranian electricity-supply system. This analytical instrument is a model of energy R&D resource allocation with an explicit perspective of developing countries which has been linked to a bottom-up energy-systems model. Three emerging electricity generation technologies of solar PV, wind turbine and gas fuel cell are considered in the model and the impact of innovation programs on cost-reducing innovation for them is examined. The main results provided by the... 

Distribution automation (DA) application for fault management in the electricity distribution networks is one of the main potential remedial actions to reduce customers' outage times and hence improve service reliability. As a result, various automation schemes have been developed and introduced in different countries and by different venders. The impacts of implementing a specific automation scheme on reliability indices of a given distribution system can be different from other available automation schemes. For this reason, when comparing the available automation schemes with each other or with the other reliability improvement measures, it is necessary to perform a course of reliability... 

We propose an innovative design for metallic slit-groove nanostructure to increase the propagation intensity of a unidirectional Surface Plasmon Polariton (SPP) light beam. Our idea is based on the combination of the concept of unidirectional plasmonic wave propagation in a metallic slit-groove nanostructure and the well-known hybrid modes of a hybrid metal-dielectric waveguide. Our results demonstrate that the hybrid structure results in up to 5 times enhancement in the SPP beam intensity relative to the conventional design of slit-groove nanostructure. This new design of SPP based nano source can be applied in many applications including nano photonic devices  

This paper presents a hybrid QR decomposition (QRD) design that reduces the number of computations and increases their execution parallelism by using a unique combination of Multi-dimensional Givens rotations, Householder transformations and conventional 2-D Givens rotations. A semi-pipelined semi-iterative architecture is presented for the QRD core, that uses innovative design ideas to develop 2-D, Householder 3-D and 4-D/2-D configurable CORDIC processors, such that they can perform the maximum possible number of vectoring and rotation operations within the given number of cycles, while minimizing gate count and maximizing the resource utilization. Test results for the 0.3 mm 2 QRD chip,... 

Distributed power generation and the ever-growing load demand have caused fault current levels to exceed the nominal rating of the power system devices, and fault current limiters are more needed. Superconducting fault current limiter (SFCL) forms an important category of current limiters. In this paper, a novel flux-based model for the inductive shield-type high-temperature SFCL is developed based on the Bean model. This model is employed to simulate the SFCL performance in a sample circuit. Utilizing the model, the signal characterization of the limited current is determined. A prototype laboratory scale SFCL has been fabricated with superconducting rings. Yttrium barium copper oxide... 

This paper proposes a design solution for static eccentricity (SE) in axial flux resolvers (AFRs). There are two definitions for SE in AFRs. The first approach is based on the definition of SE in conventional radial flux resolvers, wherein the rotor axis does not coincide with the stator bore, but the rotor rotates around its own shaft. In other words, it is different in the angular inclination of the rotor and stator axis. Thus, the air gap of the motor is not uniform. In the second approach, which is more common in AFRs, when SE occurs, air-gap length remains uniform. Rotor axis remains parallel with the stator axis, although it does not coincide with the stator bore. This means that there... 

A joint pre- and post-coder (JPROC) is proposed for MIMO OFDM-based cognitive radio systems over correlated fading channels. The main aim is to have a trade-off between licensed networks and un-licensed networks in the underlay scenario. To handle the un-desired interferences on the main networks, the eigen-values of this JPROC should be small in each licensed network, as much as possible, whereas un-licensed users have higher rates. Frequency selective MIMO fading channels are coded with orthogonal space-time-frequency block codes (OSTFBCs) to improve the bad effects of these small eigen-values on the signal to noise ratio (SNR) in the main network. On the other hand, the system is operated... 

Linear sampling of sparse vectors via sensing matrices has been a much investigated problem in the past decade. The nonlinear sampling methods, such as quadratic forms are also studied marginally to include undesired effects in data acquisition devices (e.g., Taylor series expansion up to two terms). In this paper, we introduce customized nonlinear sampling techniques that provide possibility of sparse signal recovery. The main advantage of the nonlinear method over the conventional linear schemes is the reduction in the number of required samples to 2k for recovery of k-sparse signals. We also introduce a low-complexity reconstruction method similar to the annihilating filter in the... 

Distribution automation (DA) application for fault management in the electricity distribution networks is one of the main potential remedial actions to reduce customers' outage times and hence improve service reliability. As a result, various automation schemes have been developed and introduced in different countries and by different venders. The impacts of implementing a specific automation scheme on reliability indices of a given distribution system can be different from other available automation schemes. For this reason, when comparing the available automation schemes with each other or with the other reliability improvement measures, it is necessary to perform a course of reliability... 

In this paper, some models have been introduced for dynamic thermal modeling of cast-resin transformers which are based on genetic algorithm. A typical 400kVA cast-resin transformer has been selected and the model parameters are estimated and validated with the help of experimental data extracted from different load cycles. The estimated models are used to generate a reliability model for cast-resin dry-type transformers and the effects of variation in load, ambient temperature and atmosphere conditions on the reliability of castresin transformer are illustrated. As it will be shown in this paper, the effects of working conditions on the life-time of insulation in dry-type transformers is... 

The accuracy of static neutronic parameters in the nuclear reactors depends upon the determination of group constants of the diffusion equation in the desired geometry. Although several methods have been proposed for calculating these parameters, there is still the need for more reliable methods. In this paper a powerful and innovative method based on Spatial Homogenization and Temperature Variation (SHTV) of physical properties of a WWER-1000 nuclear reactor core for calculating the relative power distribution of Fuel Assemblies (FA) and the hot fuel rod, is presented. The method is based on replacing the heterogeneous lattices of materials with different properties by an equivalent...