Sharif Digital Repository

In this paper an optimized wind/PV hybrid system with battery and diesel backup is designed. As a result of this study the costs of the hybrid system will be minimized in its 20-year life time. The optimization is done by considering the annual load increase and fuel cost rise. This Optimization is subject to load covering and minimizing the total cost. The total cost entailed maintenance, equipment and diesel fuel consumption substitution. An advanced variation of individual particle optimization algorithm (IPO) is used to solve the optimization problem  

Synthesis of dextran-graft-poly(hydroxyethyl methacrylate) gels as a new fluoride biosorbent was considered in this work. For this propose, the Taguchi experimental design method was used for optimizing the synthetic conditions of the gels to reach high level of fluoride absorbency. The effects of three main parameters including concentrations of monomer (hydroxyethyl methacrylate), crosslinking agent (ethylene glycol dimethacrylate), and initiator (ammonium persulfate) on the final properties of the prepared gels were investigated. The proposed mechanism for grafting and chemically crosslinking reactions was proved with equilibrium water absorption, Fourier-transformed infrared, scanning... 

Discrimination of chiral targets is generally achieved with chiral nanomaterials. However, the limited number of intrinsic chiral nanostructures as well as their complex synthesis procedure has led to the production of chirality-induced nanomaterials as alternatives. Chirality can be induced in nanomaterials by either chirality transfer or the formation of chiral assemblies. Using the latter approach, in this work, we have provided chiral supramolecular assemblies of CdTe quantum dots (QDs) from achiral starting materials. CTAB-QD assemblies showed chiroptical activities, and their orange emission in combination with the blue emission of carbon dots was utilized as a ratiometric chiral... 

This research investigates the flexural behavior of a polymer concrete beam/pile encased with carbon fiber sleeve. The mechanical properties of carbon fiber sleeves in tension and cement and polymer concrete in compression were determined. Polymer concrete beams were tested in flexure to determine the bending moment capacity. Then, the test results were compared to the theoretical model results. Finally, a parametric study was conducted to determine the influence of beam/pile parameters on the capacity of the element. Based on the investigation, carbon fiber sleeve filled with polymer concrete exhibits outstanding structural performance including ductility and bending capacity. © 2017 Taylor... 

This research investigates the flexural behavior of a polymer concrete beam/pile encased with carbon fiber sleeve. The mechanical properties of carbon fiber sleeves in tension and cement and polymer concrete in compression were determined. Polymer concrete beams were tested in flexure to determine the bending moment capacity. Then, the test results were compared to the theoretical model results. Finally, a parametric study was conducted to determine the influence of beam/pile parameters on the capacity of the element. Based on the investigation, carbon fiber sleeve filled with polymer concrete exhibits outstanding structural performance including ductility and bending capacity  

Discrimination of chiral targets is generally achieved with chiral nanomaterials. However, the limited number of intrinsic chiral nanostructures as well as their complex synthesis procedure has led to the production of chirality-induced nanomaterials as alternatives. Chirality can be induced in nanomaterials by either chirality transfer or the formation of chiral assemblies. Using the latter approach, in this work, we have provided chiral supramolecular assemblies of CdTe quantum dots (QDs) from achiral starting materials. CTAB-QD assemblies showed chiroptical activities, and their orange emission in combination with the blue emission of carbon dots was utilized as a ratiometric chiral... 

Levodopa [L-3, 4-dihydroxyphenylalanine, or L-DOPA] is an important neurotransmitter used for the treatment of neural disorders such as Parkinson's disease. Abnormal L-Dopa concentrations in biological fluids can be used for the evaluation of such diseases. In this work, a rapid and sensitive method for L-DOPA detection has been reported which is based on in situ formation of polylevodopa nanoparticles. Under alkaline conditions, L-DOPA is spontaneously oxidized to its quinone derivative and shows fluorescence properties. The fluorescence signal of the oxidation product has been monitored and used for the determination of L-DOPA in the presence of dopamine, uric acid, ascorbic acid and other... 

Numerical modeling of periodically patterned graphene sheets (PPGS) embedded in planar multilayered media using Fourier-based methods suffers from very slow convergence because of the fact that the conductivity is zero in unfilled areas of the patterned surface and, thus, the so-called Li's inverse rule is not applicable. In this paper, a simple and efficient approach is proposed to overcome this problem such that the exact boundary condition can be applied and the surface current density on PPGS can be obtained accurately. Here, the PPGS is modeled as a conductive surface and only its conductivity representation by the Fourier series is modified. The proposed method can be used easily for... 

In this paper, we propose CodedSketch, as a distributed straggler-resistant scheme to compute an approximation of the multiplication of two massive matrices. The objective is to reduce the recovery threshold, defined as the total number of worker nodes that the master node needs to wait for to be able to recover the final result. To exploit the fact that only an approximated result is required, in reducing the recovery threshold, some sorts of pre-compression are required. However, compression inherently involves some randomness that would lose the structure of the matrices. On the other hand, considering the structure of the matrices is crucial to reduce the recovery threshold. In... 

In this paper, we propose CodedSketch, as a distributed straggler-resistant scheme to compute an approximation of the multiplication of two massive matrices. The objective is to reduce the recovery threshold, defined as the total number of worker nodes that the master node needs to wait for to be able to recover the final result. To exploit the fact that only an approximated result is required, in reducing the recovery threshold, some sorts of pre-compression are required. However, compression inherently involves some randomness that would lose the structure of the matrices. On the other hand, considering the structure of the matrices is crucial to reduce the recovery threshold. In... 

One of the major challenges in using distributed learning to train complicated models with large data sets is to deal with stragglers effect. As a solution, coded computation has been recently proposed to efficiently add redundancy to the computation tasks. In this technique, coding is used across data sets, and computation is done over coded data, such that the results of an arbitrary subset of worker nodes with a certain size are enough to recover the final results. The major drawbacks with those approaches are (1) they are limited to polynomial functions, (2) the number of servers that we need to wait for grows with the degree of the model, (3) they are not numerically stable for... 

[No abstract available]  

In an acceptance-sampling plan, where items of an incoming batch of products are inspected one by one, if the number of conforming items between successive non conforming items falls below a lower control threshold, the batch is rejected. If it falls above an upper control threshold, the batch is accepted, and if it lies within the thresholds then the process of inspecting the items continues. The purpose of this article is to develop an optimization model to determine the optimum values of the thresholds such that constraints on the probability of Type I and Type II errors are satisfied. This article starts by developing a Markovian model to derive the expected total cost of the inspection... 

A new approach is developed in this paper to detect general mean shifts of multivariate quality control systems and to determine the quality characteristic(s) responsible for the shift. This approach takes advantage of both a decomposition method and an EWMA-based control statistics that are employed for multivariate normal distributions. In order to evaluate the performance of the proposed methodology, simulation studies are provided to estimate the in- and out-of-control average run lengths under different mean and variance shift scenarios. Simulation experiments are also given to compare the performances of the proposed procedure with the ones of the well-known MEWMA and MCUSUM methods.... 

In this paper, a heuristic threshold policy is developed to detect and classify the states of a multivariate quality control system. In this approach, a probability measure called belief is first assigned to the quality characteristics and then the posterior belief of out-of-control characteristics is updated by taking new observations and using a Bayesian rule. If the posterior belief is more than a decision threshold, called minimum acceptable belief determined using a heuristic threshold policy, then the corresponding quality characteristic is classified out-of-control. Besides using a different approach, the main difference between the current research and previous works is that the... 

Gold nanorods (AuNRs) have recently become fascinating chromophores in the field of colorimetric sensing because of their eye-catching rainbow colors along with the high dimensionality of their optical profile. The etching of AuNRs using an analyte-sensitive oxidizing agent is particularly an attractive tool not only for adjusting their plasmonic behavior through altering their aspect ratio but also for correlating the observed signal with the identity and concentration of the analyte. However, the deployment of this strategy in the field of sensing has been seriously hindered by various factors ranging from slow etching kinetics and the need for nonambient temperatures to low degrees of... 

A new ultra wideband (UWB) pulse generator covering a-10 dB bandwidth of 2.4-4.6 GHz with a tunable center frequency of 5-5.6 GHz to mitigate coexistence issues of impulse radio UWB (IR-UWB) systems and IEEE802.11.a WLAN or other narrowband (NB) systems in 90 nm-CMOS technology is proposed. The UWB pulse is generated based on frequency up-conversion of the first derivative of the Gaussian pulse, which creates an adjustable null in the frequency spectrum. Simulation results show that employing the proposed pulse generator mitigates the mutual interference between UWB and WLAN systems, significantly. The proposed transmitter consists of a low frequency signal generator, an LC oscillator and a... 

This article proposes a hybrid optimization algorithm based on a modified BFGS and particle swarm optimization to solve medium scale nonlinear programs. The hybrid algorithm integrates the modified BFGS into particle swarm optimization to solve augmented Lagrangian penalty function. In doing so, the algorithm launches into a global search over the solution space while keeping a detailed exploration into the neighborhoods. To shed light on the merit of the algorithm, we provide a test bed consisting of 30 test problems to compare our algorithm against two of its variations along with two state-of-the-art nonlinear optimization algorithms. The numerical experiments illustrate that the proposed...