Sharif Digital Repository

In this work, two-membrane distillation (MD) modes, direct contact MD, and sweeping gas MD were investigated for synthesized and real (Persian Gulf) seawater desalination. A commercial PTFE membrane with 0.22 μm pore size was characterized (using atomic force microscopy and scanning electron microscopy) and was used for experiments. A multipurpose plate and frame MD module was used for desalination experiments. The effects of various operating conditions and MD module design, as well as feed type on the permeation flux have been studied. The feed temperature was found to be the most effective operating parameter. The flow rate in both sides of the MD module was found to be effective;... 

The Persian Gulf is one of the aquatic ecosystems which has recently been faced with different pollutions. Cooling water discharges due to various industries such as power plants can cause important disorders on the present ecosystem balance and on aquatic creatures because of their high temperature. Thermal pollution leads to their migration, creates a potential for new coming species which in turn can thoroughly change the marine ecosystem feature. In this research, thermal pollution due to the Bandar Abbas Thermal Power Plant (BATP) development plan was modeled using MIKE21 software. In order to avoid a decrease in the power plant efficiency in the development plan, the distance between... 

Understanding the fresh groundwater lens (FGL) behavior and potential threat of climatic-induced seawater intrusion (SWI) are significant for the future water resources management of many small islands. In this paper, the FGL of Kish Island, an arid-region case in the Persian Gulf, Iran, is modeled using two-dimensional (2D) and three-dimensional (3D) simulations. These simulations are based on the application of SUTRA, a density-dependent groundwater numerical model. Also, the numerical model parameters are calibrated using PEST, an automated parameter estimation code. Firstly a detailed conceptualization of the FGL model is completed to understand the sensitivity of the FGL to some... 

Free Trade Zones (FTZs) around the world offer special advantages to investors and facilitate import/export of goods in order to boost the regional economy. Integrated coastal management in these areas faces special challenges in addition to what ordinary ICZMs usually encounter. For a successful ICZM plan, the very strong business orientation in FTZs has to be taken into account, while other important aspects such as environmental, social, and cultural issues should not be overlooked. The problem becomes more difficult where the free zone is situated in sensitive and valuable environmental circumstances.Kish Island, a free trade zone in the Persian Gulf region, has recently been the focus... 

Determination of different facies in an underground reservoir with the aid of various applicable neural network methods can improve the reservoir modeling. Accordingly facies identification from well logs and cores data information is considered as the most prominent recent tasks of geological engineering. The aim of this study is to analyze and compare the five artificial neural networks (ANN) approaches with identification of various structures in a rock facies and evaluate their capability in contrast to the labor intensive conventional method. The selected networks considered are Backpropagation Neural Networks (BPNN), Radial Basis Function (RBF), Probabilistic Neural Networks (PNN),... 

Determination of different facies in an underground reservoir with the aid of various applicable neural network methods can improve the reservoir modeling. Accordingly facies identification from well logs and cores data information is considered as the most prominent recent tasks of geological engineering. The aim of this study is to analyze and compare the five artificial neural networks (ANN) approaches with identification of various structures in a rock facies and evaluate their capability in contrast to the labor intensive conventional method. The selected networks considered are Backpropagation Neural Networks (BPNN), Radial Basis Function (RBF), Probabilistic Neural Networks (PNN),... 

Environmental degradation due to economic activities is a key challenge facing sustainable development. The fossil fuel production sector is a very polluting industry. In this research, the future trends of pollution accumulation in the region due to direct/indirect oily discharge into the semi-enclosed area of the Persian Gulf are studied. The purpose of the study was not only to alert policy-makers about potential future threats in the region but also to conduct a trial to develop potential solutions to these problems. Four different environmental cases were studied via the principle of system dynamic modeling simulation. The cases consisted of three situations: relaxed, simple policy, and... 

The assessment of existing platforms under past environmental (wave, wind, current and etc.) loads and probable future loads (earthquake) is a relatively new process and has not yet been standardized as the design has. This lack of standardization creates some difficulty in establishing performance requirements which must be developed depending upon the risks (i.e., hazards, exposures and consequences) associated with the future operation of the platform. The present criteria of the offshore structure standards for seismic assessment can be improved using Building prestandards. Recently some documents such as FEMA-356 and ATC-40 are developed for seismic assessment of buildings. However... 

Spatial and temporal patterns of climatological seasonality, interannual variability, and phytoplankton phenology were estimated using satellite-derived ocean color chlorophyll-a data (Chl-a) 1998 to 2020 in the Persian Gulf from. Biogeography of phytoplankton seasonal and interannual climatology was determined using k-means multivariate clustering analysis applied on the Chl-a time-series data. As a result, two distinct regions were identified: one in the deep north and middle area (DZC) with a minimum value of Chl-a in April–July (0.62–0.76 mg m−3) and maximum in December–February (1.07–1.59 mg m−3), and the other in the north–west coastal areas and along the southwest-southern area (SZC)... 

The exact and two approximate conditional spectra are compared in this manuscript as a target spectrum for the purpose of ground motion selection. The considered site is a real offshore site located at South Pars Gas Field in the Persian Gulf region. This case study site is influenced by four major seismic area sources in which the deaggregation results confirm that many comparable seismic scenarios can be taken into account. Therefore, an alternative to the conventional approximate conditional spectrum is proposed that has a small deviation from the exact solution. In addition, the use of different conditioning status of the probabilistic seismic hazard deaggregation (i.e., occurrence... 

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...