Sharif Digital Repository

Carbon accounting is necessary for designing effective climate change mitigation policies. A proper and fair accounting method should motivate both the producers toward cleaner production methods and the consumers toward reducing the embodied emissions of their consumption. This research work proposes a new approach to map the production chain of carbon emissions in which every subsystem is responsible for the level and efficiency of its production activities and embodied emissions for providing its economic activities or final demands. The exergy cost formation concept is used to track the emissions in the production chain. The results of this accounting present the total carbon loads on... 

Ground-borne vibrations resulting from the railway and road traffic have an adverse impact on the environment and nearby infrastructures. The focus of this study is on a specific part of the Tehran-Tabriz Railway located in the vicinity of Fath Highway, Tehran. In the investigated area, there are many residential buildings very close to the railway, and consequently, the train-induced vibrations make the people disturbed. After determining the soil layering and their properties using site investigation, the effect of geofoam trenches in mitigating train-induced vibrations was numerically investigated. The results showed that both the trench depth and width were important, especially at... 

The size and speed of SRAM caches of embedded systems are increasing in response to demands for higher performance. However, the SRAM caches are vulnerable to soft errors originated from energetic nuclear particles or electrical sources. This paper proposes a new protected cache scheme, which provides high performance as well as high fault detection coverage. In this scheme, the cache space is divided into sets of different sizes. Here, the length of tag fields associated to each set is unique and is different from the other sets. The other remained bits of tags are used for protecting the tag using a fault detection scheme e.g., generalized parity. This leads to protect the cache without... 

A web-based system is designed and implemented as a risk communication tool to incentivize the public to take seismic risk mitigation measures. Risk denotes the expected monetary and social losses herein. The objective of this system is to raise the awareness of two audience groups, the general public and decision makers, about significant seismic risk in Iran. To address the general public, the system employs the notion of risk perception to put the results of sophisticated earthquake engineering risk analyses into perspective. The system also treats the epistemic uncertainty of user input due to the public's lack of technical knowledge through the notion of entropy in information theory.... 

Earthquakes can cause significant damage to vulnerable residential buildings and cause irreversible adverse economic, social, and socioeconomic consequences. Implementing hazard mitigation policies can enhance homeowners' willingness to adopt hazard mitigation measures such as seismic retrofits or insurance. Several past studies have proposed models that aimed to explain individuals' hazard mitigation behavior. Despite their advantages, these decision-making models are subject to limitations. This manuscript proposes a new decision-making model that addresses the shortcomings of previous models. The proposed decision-making model is then incorporated at the core of an agent-based model to... 

Modern commercial operations consist of critical equipments that are more susceptible to voltage sag events. The consistent and smooth running of these operations is often disrupted by voltage sags. Diverse range of solutions exist which can enhance the ride through capability of sensitive devices. This paper presents various voltage dip mitigation solutions and a methodology for analyzing the effectiveness and practical viability of these solutions. The proposed approach is based on event tree method which gives an indication about the extent of process interruption in the event of voltage sags. A case study is conducted in the paper with different combinations of practical mitigation... 

Anatase nanostructured coating has been prepared on 316 L stainless steel by sol-gel dip coating. The topography of the coatings surface has been analyzed using atomic force microscopy. The anticorrosion performance of the coatings has been evaluated using polarization curves. Effects of calcination temperature, withdrawal speed and times of coating on corrosion protection have been studied. The results showed calcination temperature of 400°C and withdrawal speed of 10 cm/min are desirable conditions to achieve high corrosion protection of 316 L stainless steel in chloride containing environments. Coatings with 3 times exhibit better resistance against corrosion in 0.5 molar NaCl solutions.... 

This paper presents a new set of reliability sensitivity measures. The purpose is to identify the optimal manner in which to mitigate risk to civil infrastructure, and reduce model uncertainty in order to improve risk estimates. Three measures are presented. One identifies the infrastructure components that should be prioritized for retrofit. Another measure identifies the infrastructure that should be prioritized for more refined modeling. The third measure identifies the models that should be prioritized in research to improve models, for example by gathering new data. The developments are presented in the context of a region with 622 buildings that are subjected to seismicity from several... 

Reliability methods are employed in this paper to analyze the seismic risk to the Vancouver metropolitan region in Canada. The use of reliability methods contrasts with several contemporary approaches for risk analysis. In this paper, two analysis approaches are presented and implemented in a new computer program. One utilizes the first-order and second-order reliability methods together with a hazard combination technique. The other is a sampling-based method that repeatedly generates damage scenarios in the time period of interest. Both strategies employ the same collection of probabilistic models for seismic risk analysis. While the models are presented in the companion paper, this paper... 

Despite widespread use of SRAM-based reconfigurable devices (SRDs) in mainstream applications, their usage has been very limited in enterprise and safety-critical applications due to SRAM susceptibility to soft errors. Previous mitigation techniques to protect SRDs impose significant area and power overheads. Additionally, they suffer from susceptibility of configuration bits to multiple bit upsets (MBUs). In this paper, we present a highly available fault-tolerant architecture to protect SRD-based designs against MBUs in both configuration and user bits. In the proposed architecture, the entire design is duplicated with respect to the relative locations of logic blocks within the SRD and...