Sharif Digital Repository

When a production facility is designed, there are various parameters affecting the number machines such as production capacity and reliability. It is often a tedious task to optimize different objectives, simultaneously. The other issue is the uncertainty in many design parameters which makes it difficult to reach a desirable solution. In this paper, we present a new mathematical model with two objectives. The primary objective function is considered to be the production capacity and the secondary objective function is total reliability. The proposed model is formulated on different units of production which are connected together in serial form and for each unit, we may have various... 

The utilization of the limited resources of a multiprocessor or multicomputer system is a primary performance issue which is crucial for the design of many scheduling algorithms. While many of the existing parallel machines benefit from a regular product network topology, almost none of the previous resource placement techniques have come to recognize and exploit this inherent regularity. This paper introduces several novel algorithms for deriving resource placement schemes in product networks based on the assumption of perfect resource placement in their underling basic graphs. Our techniques use known schemes for the basic networks as their building blocks for deploying the resource... 

Water channeling due to reservoir heterogeneity is an important factor that could decrease the displacement efficiency of a water flooding process. In this study, the ability of polyacrylamide/ chromium acetate system on altering water path in heterogeneous layered media was investigated using glass bead micromodels. After the relevant parameters were optimized, a series of water and gel injection experiments were conducted in glass bead micromodel. The experimental results show that sweep efficiency is basically controlled by gel strength. The gel strength has a minor impact on the oil recovery from the higher permeable zone, whereas the oil recovery from the lower permeable zone is a... 

Biosurfactants are surface-active compounds capable of reducing surface tension and interfacial tension. Biosurfactants are produced by various microorganisms. They are promising replacements for chemical surfactants because of biodegradability, nontoxicity, and their ability to be produced from renewable sources. However, a major obstacle in producing biosurfactants at the industrial level is the lack of cost-effectiveness. In the present study, by using corn steep liquor (CSL) as a low-cost agricultural waste, not only is the production cost reduced but a higher production yield is also achieved. Moreover, a response surface methodology (RSM) approach through the Box-Behnken method was... 

Reactive powder concrete is a new kind of powerful concrete which is called so because of tiny powder and pozzolanic materials as well as a lot of hydraulically active materials used in it and it has been presented by two French scientists in 1994. The aim of this study is to measure the possibility of producing powder concretes using local materials used in Asaluyeh Region. By calculating cement amount, water ratio to cement and optimal percentage of super plasticizer in this article, we start constructing six mix plans with different percentages of microsilica (0, 10, 15, 20, 30 and 40). Results show that 15% mix plan has the highest bending and compressive strength in three conditions of... 

In Software Product Line (SPL), Configuration Management (CM) is a multi-dimensional problem. On the one hand, the Core Assets that constitute a configuration need to be managed, and on the other hand, each product in the product line that is built using a configuration must be managed, and furthermore, the management of all these configurations must be coordinated under a single process. Therefore, CM for product lines is more complex than for single systems. The CM of any software system involves four closely related activities: Change Management (ChM), Version Management (VM), System Building (SB) and Release Management (RM) [I. Sommerville, Software Engineering, 9th edn. (Addison-Wesley,... 

Glycerin (glycerol) is a co-product of biodiesel production that is widely produced and is available at a low cost. To date, various applications have been investigated and introduced for biodiesel glycerin. In this study, a number of valuable products were produced using biodiesel glycerin and formic acid as the main reactants. Allyl alcohol is one of the valuable chemicals produced from glycerin monoformate. Efficient production of this product requires successful completion of the first section of the reaction, which is an equilibrium reaction. The highest feasible yield achieved was about 83% (based on the consumption of formic acid) at 120-140°C without the addition of any catalysts.... 

Cupric oxide (CuO) nanostructures are grown on fluorine doped tin oxide (FTO) coated glass substrate using aqueous solution approach. The concentration of precursor's solution has significant impact on morphology of CuO nanostructure. By varying concentration of precursor, the growth of two different morphologies (oriented nanosheets and nanoleaves) is achieved. X-ray diffraction pattern and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy reveals formation of pure CuO crystalline phase. Mott-Schottky characteristic confirms the p-type semiconducting nature. Ultrathin structures of nanoleaves lead to higher light trapping and light absorption in visible-NIR region. The nanoleaves film has lower bandgap in... 

In recent years, the technological advancement of supercapacitors has been increasing exponentially due to the high demand in electronic consumer products. As so, researchers have found a way to meet that demand by fabricating graphene. As developments are made toward the future, two big advancements to be made are large-scale fabrication of graphene and fabricating graphene as a flexible electrode. This would allow for use in larger products and for manipulation of the unique properties of graphene to accommodate superior design alternatives. While large scale production is still mentioned, this review is specifically focusing on different methods used to fabricate graphene as a flexible... 

Glycerin (glycerol) is a co-product of biodiesel production that is widely produced and is available at a low cost. To date, various applications have been investigated and introduced for biodiesel glycerin. In this study, a number of valuable products were produced using biodiesel glycerin and formic acid as the main reactants. Allyl alcohol is one of the valuable chemicals produced from glycerin monoformate. Efficient production of this product requires successful completion of the first section of the reaction, which is an equilibrium reaction. The highest feasible yield achieved was about 83% (based on the consumption of formic acid) at 120-140°C without the addition of any catalysts.... 

The aim of the Software Product Line (SPL) approach is to improve the software development process by producing software products that match the stakeholders' requirements. One of the important topics in SPLs is the feature model (FM) configuration process. The purpose of configuration here is to select and remove specific features from the FM in order to produce the required software product. At the same time, detection of differences between application's requirements and the available capabilities of the implementation platform is a major concern of application requirements engineering. It is possible that the implementation of the selected features of FM needs certain software and... 

In this article, we introduce the algebra of block-symmetric cylinders and we show that symmetric cylindrical constructions on base-graphs admitting commutative decompositions behave as generalized tensor products. We compute the characteristic polynomial of such symmetric cylindrical constructions in terms of the spectra of the base-graph and the cylinders in a general setting. This gives rise to a simultaneous generalization of some well-known results on the spectra of a variety of graph amalgams, as various graph products, graph subdivisions and generalized Petersen graph constructions. While our main result introduces a connection between spectral graph theory and commutative... 

Optimal production-distribution planning prevents capital accumulation, reduces costs, unemployment of machinery, and provides a good plan to satisfying customer needs. In this paper, a mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) model is developed to determine optimal production-distribution planning in electromotor manufacturing industries. The proposed model is a multi-product and multi-period one in which optimal amounts of production, inventory and distribution are determined in different periods. Also, the possibility of capacity expansion of facilities in different periods are modelled to optimally determine the capacity increase if necessary. To validate the proposed model, it is applied... 

Purpose: Does the long-term growth rate of a firm increase by exporting? If yes, how large is that increase in a developing economy? The paper aims to discuss this issue. Design/methodology/approach: The authors incorporate data from the manufacturing plants in Iran as a developing economy for 2003–2011 to address this question. Using fixed effect panel and propensity score matching method, the authors examine whether exportation can affect a firm’s growth rate to test for the learning to grow hypothesis. Findings: The findings document that: not only the exporters are larger and more productive than non-exporters, but they also grow faster in size and productivity measures as well.... 

We analyse optimal pricing for a retailer that sells two products using a mixed price bundling strategy. We consider substitutable products, where there is a disutility associated with jointly consuming both products. Mixed price bundling implies that customers can freely choose to buy one of the two products, both of them, or neither of them. The retailer determines the price of each product when it is sold separately, the bundle discount if these two products are sold in a bundle, and the inventory levels for each product. We first derive the optimal price and bundle discount when the store traffic is deterministic. Our results show that the mixed bundling strategy is the most beneficial... 

This study aims to investigate the hydrogen production process using an integrated system based on solar energy. This system includes an evacuated tube collector to absorb solar energy as input energy of the system. A parametric analysis was conducted to determine the most important design parameters and evaluate these parameters' impact on the system's objective functions. For identifying the optimum system conditions, multi-objective optimization was performed using particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm. The results obtained from the parametric analysis show that an increment in the collector mass flow rate and the turbine inlet temperature, as well as a decrement in the collector... 

Due to the importance of environmental protection and the need to use new energy and alternative to conventional fuels, renewable energy has received much attention. Due to this necessity, a discontinuous bioreactor producing methane gas from animal waste has been modeled and simulated in this research. Monod kinetics was used to express the relationship between the growth rate of microorganisms and substrate concentration. The fourth-order Rong Kuta numerical method solved the substrate consumption and production of microorganisms and methane gas. The effect of the initial concentration of microorganisms on methane production has also been investigated. The initial concentrations of... 

We consider a multi-species generalization of the Asymmetric Simple Exclusion Process on an open chain, in which particles hop with their characteristic hopping rates and fast particles can overtake slow ones. The number of species is arbitrary and the hopping rates can be selected from a discrete or continuous distribution. We determine exactly the phase structure of this model and show how the phase diagram of the 1-species ASEP is modified. Depending on the distribution of hopping rates, the system can exist in a three-phase regime or a two-phase regime. In the three-phase regime the phase structure is almost the same as in the one species case, that is, there are the low density, the... 

Water allocation is a process of identifying the stakeholders, assessing the amount of water they need, and estimating the volume of renewable water resources. This study investigates the coalition possibilities among the riparian in the Aras River as a transboundary basin over-allocating the environmental flow share. To this end, first, the environmental flow is estimated downstream of the basin based on the annual potential runoff. Then, to estimate the agricultural production function in each country, the relationship between the agriculture value-added and the variables like annual potential runoff and capital in the agricultural sector is derived using the seemingly unrelated regression... 

This review aims to bring together the studies on petroleum reservoirs' sand production control in a comprehensive guide for the researcher to compare various methods for the chemical consolidation of sand. Sand production can be considered one of the major challenges in the petroleum production industry, causing severe operational issues. This study introduces various methods to control and prevent sand production in petroleum wells and evaluates their advantages and performance in tabular form. The use of chemical procedures is considered to be more efficient in counteracting the production and migration of sand. Various chemicals and polymers have been proposed for this purpose. These...