Sharif Digital Repository

Refrigerators have considerable share of residential consumption. They can be, however, flexible loads because their operating time and consumption patterns can be changed to some extent. Accordingly, they can be selected as a target for the study of Demand Side Management plans. In this paper, two experimental models for a refrigerator are derived. In obtaining the first model, following assumptions are made: the ambient temperature of refrigerator is assumed to be constant and the refrigerator door is remained closed. However, in the second model the variation of ambient temperature and door-opening effects are considered according to some general patterns. Further, two strategies are... 

Due to the complexity of the human spinal motion segments, the intervertebral joints are often simulated in the musculoskeletal trunk models as pivots thus allowing no translational degrees of freedom (DOFs). This work aims to investigate, for the first time, the effect of such widely used assumption on trunk muscle forces, spinal loads, kinematics, and stability during a number of static activities. To address this, the shear deformable beam elements used in our nonlinear finite element (OFE) musculoskeletal model of the trunk were either substantially stiffened in translational directions (SFE model) or replaced by hinge joints interconnected through rotational springs (HFE model). Results... 

This study presents a parallel evolutionary optimization approach to determine optimal management strategies of large-scale coastal groundwater problems. The population loops of evolutionary algorithms (EA) are parallelized using shared memory parallelism to address the high computational demands of such applications. This methodology is applied to solve the management problems in an aquifer system in Kish Island, Iran using a three-dimensional density-dependent groundwater numerical model. EAs of continuous ant colony optimization (CACO), particle swarm optimization, and genetic algorithm are utilized to solve the optimization problems. By implementing the parallelization strategy, a... 

In the design of a carbon dioxide capture and storage (CCS) process, the thermal conductivity of carbon dioxide is of special concern. Hence, it is quite important to search for a quick and accurate determination of thermal conductivity of CO2 for precise modeling and evaluation of such a process. To achieve this aim, a robust computing methodology, entitled least square support vector machine (LSSVM) modeling, which is coupled with an optimization approach, was used to model this transport property. The model was constructed and evaluated employing a comprehensive data bank (more than 550 data series) covering wide ranges of pressures and temperatures. Before constructing the model, outlier... 

Recently production optimization has gained increasing interest in the petroleum industry. The most computationally expensive part of the production optimization process is the evaluation of the objective function performed by a numerical reservoir simulator. Employing surrogate models (a.k.a. proxy models) as a substitute for the reservoir simulator is proposed for alleviating this high computational cost.In this study, a novel approach for constructing adaptive surrogate models with application in production optimization problem is proposed. A dynamic Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) is employed as the approximation function while the training is performed using an adaptive sampling... 

The process of coarsening the detailed geological model of a reservoir to simulation models is known as upscaling. There are two fundamental steps in the procedure of upscaling, i.e., defining the coarse grid geometry and calculating the average properties for the generated coarse grid. In this paper, the focus will be on investigating the applicability of optimization in the context of coarse grid geometry definition. To do so, different objective function candidates will be defined, and their behavior in terms of predicting the two-phase flow accuracy of coarse grids will be analyzed to determine the proper objective function. A modified objective function employing the idea of analytical... 

A genetic programming technique was employed to develop empirical models for predicting specific wear rate and coefficient of friction on brake friction materials. The models consist of independent variables representing the volume fraction of the ingredients. The average absolute relative error for specific wear rate and coefficient of friction were found to be 1.93% and 1.92%, respectively. The models were also verified by the experimental data used for further control of the formulation. Utilizing Tornado plots, the models were found to be able to properly demonstrate the role of the ingredients on overall tribological performance of the brake friction materials. Moreover, a non-dominated... 

Comparative studies between response surface methodology (RSM) and artificial neural network (ANN) methods to find the effects of electrospinning parameters on the porosity of nanofiber mats is described. The four important electrospinning parameters studied included solution concentration (wt.%), applied voltage (kV), spinning distance (cm) and volume flow rate (mL/h). It was found that the applied voltage and solution concentration are the two critical parameters affecting the porosity of the nanofiber mats. The two approaches were compared for their modeling and optimization capabilities with the modeling capability of RSM showing superiority over ANN, having comparatively lower values of... 

We study a system of ordinary differential equations which describes the metapopulation SIR model. The main target is to control the epidemic spreading using the structure of connections between cities. For this purpose, we formulate optimal control strategy that the control represents a drug treatment and Prevention strategies . Some methods are given in numerical example section such as control through spectral radius of movement matrix or optimal control through travelling between cities. Existence results for the optimal control are studied  

Nowadays, analyzing large amount of data is of paramount importance for many companies. Big data and business intelligence applications are facilitated by the MapReduce programming model while, at infrastructural layer, cloud computing provides flexible and cost effective solutions for allocating on demand large clusters. Capacity allocation in such systems is a key challenge to providing performance for MapReduce jobs and minimize cloud resource cost. The contribution of this paper is twofold: (i) we formulate a linear programming model able to minimize cloud resources cost and job rejection penalties for the execution of jobs of multiple classes with (soft) deadline guarantees, (ii) we... 

The problem of Rapid Transit Network Design (RTND) is studied in this paper. Due to the noticeable contribution of rapid transit lines in public transportation network of large urban areas, this problem is interesting to the transportation specialists. On the other hand, the success stories of Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) systems in different countries have motivated us to study BRT network planning. BRT systems can be developed with less investment costs and construction time in comparison with rail-based systems. Therefore, planning Bus Rapid Transit lines, either to develop a new rapid transit network or extend a current one can be an interesting research topic. This problem, like other... 

An industrial-scale reactor for ethylene production was modeled using the oxidative dehydrogenation of ethane (ODHE) in a multi-tubular reactor system, examining a variety of parameters affecting reactor performance. The model showed that a double-bed multi-tubular reactor with intermediate air injection scheme was superior to a single-bed design, due to the increased ethylene selectivity while operating under lower oxygen partial pressures. The optimized reactor length for 100% oxygen conversion was theoretically determined for both reactor designs. The use of a distributed oxygen feed with a limited number of injection points indicated a significant improvement on the reactor performance... 

In this study, application of the Response Surface Methodology and the Central Composite Design (CCD) technique for modeling and optimization of the influence of several operating variables on titanium recovery in a leaching process were investigated. The four main leaching parameters, namely temperature, acid concentration, leaching time and solid to liquid ratio, were changed during-the leaching experiments based on the CCD. A total of 30 leaching experiments were designed and carried out in the CCD method according to software-based designed matrix. According to the results, i.e., titanium recoveries with these four parameters as well as empirical model equations were developed. The model... 

This paper presents a detailed frequency-domain system identification method applied to identify steering dynamics of a coastal patrol vessel using a data analysis software called CIFER. Advanced features such as the Chirp-Z transform and composite window optimization are used to extract high quality frequency responses. An accurate, robust and linear transfer function model is derived for yaw and roll dynamics of the vessel. To evaluate the accuracy of the identified model, time domain responses from a 45-45 zig-zag test are compared with the responses predicted by the identified model. The identified model shows excellent predictive capability and is well suited for simulation and... 

In the present study, we developed a multi-component one-dimensional mathematical model for simulation and optimisation of a commercial catalytic slurry reactor for the direct synthesis of dimethyl ether (DME) from syngas and CO2, operating in a churn-turbulent regime. DME productivity and CO conversion were optimised by tuning operating conditions, such as superficial gas velocity, catalyst concentration, catalyst mass over molar gas flow rate (W/F), syngas composition, pressure and temperature. Reactor modelling was accomplished utilising mass balance, global kinetic models and heterogeneous hydrodynamics. In the heterogeneous flow regime, gas was distributed into two bubble phases: small... 

In this article, we propose a bi-objective model for the pricing-queuing problem under a fuzzy environment. We consider two objectives: maximizing the profit function and minimizing the waiting time in queue. Imagine a firm which sells a product in a channel providing after sales services. The sales price and warranty length affect customer demand. We formulate the demand function as a fuzzy system considering the sales price and warranty length. The firm optimizes the sales price and warranty length, as well as waiting time, in the queue of after sales services, to maximize its revenues and minimize waiting time. To solve the derived model, we develop a hybrid solution method of a fuzzy... 

Network-on-Chips are now the popular communication medium to support inter-IP communications in complex on-chip systems with tens to hundreds IP cores. Higher scalability (compared to the traditional shared bus and point-to-point interconnects), throughput, and reliability are among the most important advantages of NoCs. Moreover, NoCs can well match current CAD methodologies mainly relying on modular and reusable structures with regularity of structural pattern. However, since NoCs are resource-limited, determining how to distribute application load over limited on-chip resources (e.g. switches, buffers, virtual channels, and wires) in order to improve the metrics of interest and satisfy... 

During the milling process, self-excited vibration or chatter adversely affects tool life, surface quality and productivity rate. In this paper, nonlinear cutting forces of milling process are considered as a function of chip thickness with a complete third order polynomial (instead of the common linear dependency). An optimal control strategy is developed for chatter suppression of the system described through nonlinear delay differential equations. Counterbalance forces exerted by actuators in x and y directions are the control inputs. For optimal control problem, an appropriate performance index is defined such that the regenerative chatter is suppressed while control efforts are... 

Natural gas has widely been used as a fuel in conventional Diesel and spark ignition engines. The better understanding of injector parameters on the jet structure is helpful for the combustion optimization. This paper presents an experimental and numerical study on the jet structure of gaseous fuel injector in spark ignition direct injection engine by Schlieren technique and numerical procedure. Helium was injected through a gaseous injector at the different pressure ratios and nozzle diameters to understand the effects of nozzle geometry and pressure ratio for a dedicated correlation of CNG-SIDI injector. It was found that higher pressure ratio and exit nozzle diameter led to more tip... 

In this work, treatment of oily wastewaters with commercial polyacrylonitrile (PAN) ultrafiltration (UF) membranes was investigated. In order to do these experiments, the outlet wastewater of the API (American Petroleum Institute) unit of Tehran refinery, is used as the feed. The purpose of this paper was to predict the permeation flux and fouling resistance, by applying artificial neural networks (ANNs), and then to optimize the operating conditions in separation of oil from industrial oily wastewaters, including trans-membrane pressure (TMP), cross-flow velocity (CFV), feed temperature and pH, so that a maximum permeation flux accompanied by a minimum fouling resistance, was acquired by...