Sharif Digital Repository

pH control is known to be a challenging problem due to its highly nonlinear nature. Several control strategies are proposed for controlling pH processes among which is the strong acid equivalent scheme. Although this technique is robust to modeling error, the controller performance is degraded if the titration curve undergoes large changes. To overcome this problem, two control schemes that are based on the strong acid equivalent strategy and that use the multiple models, switching, and tuning approach are proposed in this work. For modeling, both fixed and adaptive models are considered. An experimental setup is used to evaluate the performance of the proposed scheme. The effectiveness of... 

Surface-Piercing Propellers (SPPs) are essential categories of high-performance propulsion systems usually used for high-speed boats, which are designed to operate in semi-submerged conditions. In such conditions, a propeller performs in a two-phase mixed environment, consisting of water and air concurrently. Due to the intrinsic complexity of the working environment, describing the performance of an SPP is complex and cannot be recognized with the traditional submerged propellers. The present study aims to assess the effect of immersion depth on semi-submersible propellers. Accordingly, experimental tests in a towing tank were used along with a numerical method to achieve reliable results.... 

In this study, the effect of protection methods regarding the corrosion decrement of steel in concrete was simulated by artificial neural networks (ANNs) and fuzzy logic (FL) approaches. Hot dip galvanizing as a protective coating, Ferrogard 901 corrosion inhibitor, a pozzolanic component, such as fly ash (FA) and micro-silica (MS), and eventually rebar AISI-304 were employed in concrete. Reinforced concrete samples were held under impressed voltage of 30 V in 3.5 % NaCl electrolyte for 350 hours toward a stainless-steel auxiliary electrode. Corrosion currents have been modelled using feed forward back propagation ANNs and FL methods. The results demonstrate good consistency between... 

The flow through an axisymmetric supersonic mixed-compression air inlet has been simulated numerically to investigate the effects and the necessity of the three-dimensional (3D) modeling in comparison with the axisymmetric one. For this purpose, a supersonic inlet has been simulated numerically via axisymmetric and 3D CFD solvers, using the steady state Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes equations along with the SST k-ω turbulence model, for a free-stream Mach number of 2.0 and at zero degrees angle of attack. The grid for the 3D cases was a 14.4-degree sector, instead of a 360-degree domain one, with rotational periodic boundary condition for the side boundaries. The results show that both... 

Traditionally, solid-liquid mixing has always been regarded as an empirical technology with many aspects of mixing, dispersing and contacting where related to power draw. One important application of solid-liquid mixing is the preparation of brine from sodium formate. This material has been widely used as a drilling and completion fluid in challenging environments such as in the Barents Sea. In this paper large-eddy simulations, of a turbulent flow in a solid-liquid, baffled, cylindrical mixing vessel with a large number of solid particles, are performed to obtain insight into the fundamental aspects of a mixing tank. The impeller-induced flow at the blade tip radius is modeled by using the... 

Monte Carlo simulations have been carried out for 2-methoxyethanol in an isothermal-isobaric ensemble (NPT) at 298.15 K and 1 atm pressure. The optimized potential for liquid simulation force field parameters has been used for modeling 2-methoxyethanol and the TIP4P model for water. Intramolecular rotations are described by an analytical potential function fitted to ab initio energies. It has been shown that the water molecules can form hydrogen bonds between adjacent O atoms of CH3OCH2CH2OH in aqueous media. The self-association of 2-methoxyethanol in aqueous media has been studied by statistical perturbation theory  

Inspired by an upward stochastic walking idea, a new ensemble pruning method called simulated quenching walking (SQWALKING) is developed in this paper. The rationale behind this method is to give values to stochastic movements as well as to accept unvalued solutions during the investigation of search spaces. SQWALKING incorporates simulated quenching and forward selection methods to choose the models through the ensemble using probabilistic steps. Two versions of SQWALKING are introduced based on two different evaluation measures; SQWALKINGA that is based on an accuracy measure and SQWALKINGH that is based on a human-like foresight measure. The main objective is to construct a proper... 

Simplicity and validity are recognized as important attributes of an effective simulation model. However, some disagreement exists both on the definitions of these concepts and on quantitative measures for them. This paper introduces Enrichment Level (EL) for (simulation) models. The EL is a quantitative measure to compare the effectiveness of alternative models when used in a particular project. While there is no conceptual restriction on expanding the EL, it currently captures the bias, speed, variance, and scope of a model as the main contributing enrichment factors. This paper explores these factors and suggests a utility-based method to combine them according to the relative importance... 

Weibull distribution plays an important role in failure distribution modeling in reliability studies. It is a hard work to estimate the parameters of Weibull distribution. This distribution has three parameters, but for simplicity, a parameter is omitted and as a result, the estimation of the others will be easily done. When the three-parameter distribution is of interest, the estimation procedure will be quite boring. Maximum likelihood estimation is a good method, which is usually used to elaborate on the parameter estimation. The likelihood function formed for the parameter estimation of a three-parameter Weibull distribution is very hard to maximize. Many researchers have studied this... 

Natural ventilation has been used to increase indoor air quality, remove pollutants, and remove heat absorbed in the building structure. Some architectural features such as wind-catcher systems are used to induce airflow into buildings, and openings equipped with louvers are employed to reduce solar daylight while allowing natural ventilation. Earlier studies on ventilated louvers and wind-catchers have shown the impact of the louvers’ opening positions and slat angles. However, their combination with each other has been less studied. This paper presents CFD simulations of cross-ventilation in a generic isolated building integrated with a one-sided roof-top wind-catcher and the outlet... 

Molecular dynamics simulations are carried out to investigate the manipulation of metallic clusters on stepped surfaces. Five surface forms are considered in the simulations. The system parts are made of pure transition metals and Sutton-Chen many-body potential is used as interatomic potential. The conditions which are subjected to change in the tests include: materials used for particles and substrate, and surface step conditions. In addition to qualitative observations, two criteria which represent the particle deformation and substrate abrasion are utilized as evaluation tools and are computed for each case. Simulation results show the effect of the aforementioned working conditions on... 

Molecular dynamics simulations are carried out to investigate the manipulation of metallic clusters on double-layer surfaces. The system parts are made of transition metals. The conditions which are subjected to change in the tests are material combinations for cluster, main substrate and lubricant layer (adlayer). In addition to qualitative observations, two criteria which represent the particle deformation and substrate abrasion are utilized as evaluation tools and are computed for each case. Obtaining this sort of knowledge is highly beneficial for further experiments in order to be able to plan the conditions and routines, which guarantee better success in the manipulation process  

The aim of this study is to employ feedback control loops to provide a stable forward dynamics simulation of human movement under repeated position constraint conditions in the environment, particularly during stair climbing. A ten-degrees-of-freedom skeletal model containing 18 Hill-type musculotendon actuators per leg was employed to simulate the model in the sagittal plane. The postural tracking and obstacle avoidance were provided by the proportional—integral—derivative controller according to the modulation of the time rate change of the joint kinematics. The stability of the model was maintained by controlling the velocity of the body's centre of mass according to the desired centre of... 

Scheduling sports leagues has drawn significant attention to itself in recent years, as it involves considerable revenue as well as challenging combinatorial optimization problems. A particular class of these problems is the Traveling Tournament Problem (TTP) which focuses on minimizing the total traveling distance for teams. In this paper, an efficient simulated annealing approach is presented for TTP which applies two simultaneous and disparate models for the problem in order to search the solutions space more effectively. Also, a computationally efficient modified greedy scheme is proposed for constructing a favorable initial solution for the simulated annealing algorithm. Our... 

The graph colouring problem, as an important NP-complete problem, is considered in this paper and a hybrid meta-heuristic approach is developed to solve it. The initial solution of the algorithm, generated by a heuristic method, is used by a simulated annealing (SA) approach to generate new solutions until no progress in a number of solutions reported. At this stage, the algorithm will use a tabu search routine and this local search operator will be followed for some iterations. After finding a better solution, the algorithm is again followed through SA. Efficiency of the algorithm is showed through various experiments on well-known benchmark problems of DIMACS. Comparison with the available... 

An enhanced unfolding inverse finite element method (IFEM) has been used together with an extended strain-based forming limit diagram (FLD) to develop a fast approach to predict the feasibility of tube hydroforming process of concept part and determine where the failure or defects can occur. In tube hydroforming, the inverse IFEM has been used for estimating the initial length of tube, axial feeding and fluid pressure. The already developed IFEM algorithm used in this study is based on the total deformation theory of plasticity. Although the nature of tube hydroforming is three-dimensional deformation, in this article a modeling technique has been used to perform the computations in... 

In this article a series of experiments were performed to demonstrate the effect of carbon dioxide injection pressure on a huff and puff process. The experimental data are used in a lab-scale model simulated with a commercial simulator to investigate the effect of soaking time, injection pore volume, and rate of injection on the heavy oil recovery. The result of experiments showed that a huff and puff process under miscible pressure conditions gives the most recovery. Simulation results illustrated that there is an optimum value for soaking time, which, for soaking times less than this value, recovery increases and for values greater than optimum the recovery decreases. The simulation study... 

The simulation results on viscoelastic fluid flows i sudden expansion geometry with different expansion ratios are presented. Oldroyd-B, linear Phan-Thien-Tanner (L-PTT) and Finitely Extensible Nonlinear Elastic (FENE-P) based constitutive equations were applied in two-dimensional Cartesian coordinates. The governing equations in transient and fully developed regions were solved using open source software called OpenFOAM. The flow patterns, including velocity profiles, shear stresses and first normal stress differences in some horizontal and vertical sections are illustrated. In addition, effects of the fluid type, flow dynamics and expansion ratio on the flow and vortex patterns in...