Sharif Digital Repository

According to Sheldon (1988) textbooks are visible hearts of any English language teaching program. Relevant textbooks are prerequisites of an appropriate teaching and learning situation (Hutchinson & Torres, 1994). Evaluation is helpful for making subsequent informed decisions through providing information on the usefulness and effectiveness of textbooks (Allwright, 1981). The Right Path to English and English Book are two Iranian textbook series that have been prescribed by the Ministry of Education for teaching in public Junior and Senior high schools, respectively. Employing Litz's (2005) questionnaires, attitudes of Iranian learners and teachers were obtained on both the series.... 

The airport terminal is difficult to plan and design due to the different components and the intricate complexity of its parts. At the airport terminal, we face a queue system which simulation is always a good way to analyze. In addition, computer simulation using modern softwares with the capability to model different types of systems, including the airport terminal, while being less realistic than analytical models, is less costly than operational Exercise.In this study, a supportive approach for better and specific management of Iranian airport terminal buildings with discrete-event simulation is proposed, considering the need for managing the airport terminals building in the country and... 

Limited water resources in Iran have made dams an important part of the country’s infrastructure. As a result of the large number of in-progress and expected dam projects in the country, consideration of sustainability factors during planning, construction and operation phases of dam projects can create significant economical, social and environmental impacts in the long term. To come up with an inclusive sustainable development, new sustainability assessment approaches seek for sustainable development at the entire project’s life-cycle; they are looking for sustainable development at all design, construction, operation, maintenance and even demolition phases. In this research we have... 

Nowadays, most of businesses are becoming computer-based. This trend causes the organizations to become more vulnerable to internal and external threats. Internal threats are done through insiders. Insiders unlike outsiders have capabilities which aid them to easily carry out their illicit activities. Unfortunately, most of research in computer security has focused on the outsider threats, whereas the most damaging is the result of insiders’ illicit activities.This dissertation addresses three primary necessities of the research in the area of insider threat: a consistent definition of insider threat, a classification of types of insider threats, and a classification of vulnerabilities which... 

Integrity of closed-loop systems with integral action control is characterized by using a series of successively more difficult to obtain conditions: Integral Stabilizable (IS), Integral Controllable (IC), Integral Controllable with Integrity (ICI), and Decentralized Integral Controllability (DIC). The IS condition requires that for a Linear Time-Invariant (LTI) finitedimensional (FD) plant, G(s), one finds a stabilizing decentralized controller with integral action. For G(s) to be IC, in addition to being IS, one should be able to reduce the gain of
all control loops by the same factor from a finite value to (but not including) zero without introducing instabilities. ICI requires that... 

This project focuses on the Tennessee East-man challange problem(TEP) and the impact of setpoint changes and controller tunning on plant performance and profitability. TE has four major units. it is an unstable system due to the reaction within the reactor and a recycle streamcausing snow ball effect. As a result the control of this system is not easy. The study has been conducted along two main directions. First, selecting the optimal values for the setpoints and applying them in the simulation. secondly, try to find better parameter for controller in simulation. Simulation is based on working of Ricker. In TEP like the other multivariable systems, it is ameanable to use a centralized... 

Intraction in multi input multi output (MIMO) system makes control of these systems difficult.There are two ways to control such systems; Centralized and Decentralized control. One way in which a centralized controller is designed is using a precompensator. With application of the pre-compensator, the MIMO sytem is decoupled into several SISO systems and one can control these seperatly. Almost all previews methods for the design of pre-compensator assume that the model of the plant containsno uncertainties.In this thesis a new method is proposed which takes into account model uncertaintes in the design of the pre-compensator.The form of the uncertainties considred an interval-parametric  

Decentralized control is a typical method for the design of industrial MIMO control systems. However, in most multivariable systems, the existence of large interactions limit the achievable performance of such controllers. In the Nyquist Array design method proposed by Rosenbrock, the system interactions can be reduced using a precompensator, such that a decentralized controller may be used with acceptable performance. A well designed pre-compensator will effectively decouple the system and the multivariable systems may be considered as a set of SISO systems. It is therefore obvious that the key element in the Nyquist Array design method is the design of the pre-compensator. There are two... 

For increasing longevity of a structure, it is not enough to notice only to designing aspects. In operation phase of a construction, we can increase the level of service and longevity. Asset-based Organizations, in addition to design their new assets, should maintain them. Infrastructures, such as road, bridge, dam, and water network, are important because of social and economic aspects. So they need special attention. There are efficient models for infrastructure maintenance that consider infrastructure element information, such as condition rate, weight, dimensions, deterioration rate, and cost of maintenance as inputs and give planning for maintenance in future. This planning, involves a... 

Multivariable control systems as used in the industry usually contain integral action in order to improve tracking of the output with respect to step reference changes. These systems are usually subject to input saturation due to actuator or sensor nonlinearities. The aim of this work is find the conditions for the integrity concept of such multivariable system, e.g. IS, IC, ICI and DIC. First we develop the conditions on the controller gains necessary stabilize the systems and then show that these conditions can changes when one examines integrity conditions  

Design of fault tolerant controllers with a reliable and robust control structure that can accommodate sensor and actuator failure is a challenging problem. In the process control literature, the term “integrity” is used to characterize these properties for decentralized control systems. It refers to the ability to retain system stability when one or some of the control loops get in or out of service or when loop gains are detuned.Conditions pertaining to the integrity of the closed-loop system are described by a series of successively more difficult to attain criteria whose evaluation is only based on the process steady state gains. These are Integral stabilizibility (IS), Integral... 

In continous chemical process, disturbances usually propagate along the process. This project describes a data-driven method for identifying the direction of propagation of disturbances using historical process data. The concept is the application of Transfer Entropy, a method based on the conditional probability density functions that measures directionality of variation. For demonstration purposes the transfer entropy method is used to isolate the root-cause of the disturbance in the Tennassee Eastman benchmark process  

The servomechanisms have wide industrial application such as robotics, Computer Numerical Control (CNC) machines, automated manufacturing and solar tracking. Several methods have already been proposed for servo motor control that the most important of them are Proportional Integral Derivative (PID), H2/H--, intelligent based controllers, and model predictive control. Problem specifications and user requirements, will determine the appropriate approach in each case. The aim of this thesis is construction of a real-life camera stabilizer to be used in the motion picture industry. Effects of base movement on the performance should be decreased by choosing appropriate sensors and control... 

In this thesis, the optimal control structure selection and design of sparse multi-variable control systems is addressed. A fundamental challenge which frequently emerges in engineering, social, and economic sciences, is the optimal selection of a subset of elements, in order to maximally fulfil a design objective. In practice, it is required to solve this underlying selection problem in conjunction with a non-linear or non-convex optimization which is designed to ensure desired performance. The requirement to solve these two problems simultaneously is what makes it inherently difficult; one which has thus far eluded efforts to develop a systematic means of determining its solution. In spite... 

Annually there are many small-scale industry projects implemented in Iran, most of which are financed by local financial institutes. The financing agreements between project owners and financial institutes are usually formed and finalized during the initiation phase and are based on feasibility studies done at the early stages; before project design and construction begin. However, in many cases actual costs of projects exceed the costs estimated in feasibility studies which have been approved by financial institutes. Limited financial resources in the country, from one side, and the lengthy process of increasing the project financing limit, from another side, cause delays in the project... 

Damming projects always have been important while construction, operation and even demolition due to their major effects on society, environment and economy. Although researchers have focused on one or a few phases of construction projects to develop sustainable infrastructures, the research community has to consider long term effects of developments too. There are a variety of such effects that ignoring them will cause construction of not convenient infrastructures i.e. air pollution and over-consumption of energy resources while construction, operation and demolition. Therefore, it is suggested to consider life cycle assessments to include all bad effects in all phases of a project. Dams... 

Due to the prominence of low-order controllers in industry, this thesis intends to improve the common design algorithms in this field. In this regard, the main challenge is that this problem is NP-hard due to the non-convex rank constraint which appears in the formulation. The existing algorithms mostly solve this problem by obtaining a convex sub-space for this constraint and using output feedback convex optimization methods.Two of common algorithms are non-iterative. These methods two main steps; first to obtain the full-order Lyapunov matrices related to the controller, and then, to fix the null-space of the matrices which have rank constraint. One of the advantages of the algorithm... 

Purpose: The government owns a majority of healthcare infrastructures in Iran. Annual budget assigned to the hospitals and other parts of the healthcare system constitutes a significant portion of the country’s total budget. Despite the huge money spent, and regardless of recent improvements made to the healthcare system, still Iranian’s satisfaction level from public hospitals is low. However, improving complex and congested facility and utility systems of hospital buildings, supporting various delicate hospital services, can play an important role in both reducing hospital costs and enhancing quality level of services provided. Methodology: So far, use of various advantages building... 

As population increases in the city, infrastructures have to be developed. Because of the limited financial supplies of the governments and infrastructures and high expenses of which, government is not capable of affording infrastructures to develop cities. Therefore,the government needs to encourage the private section to invest in such project for developing cities.One of the most required infrastructures for cities are parkings. parking spaces are inseparable elements of the Cities; their shortages bring many direct and indirect impacts on the quality of life of the Citizens, including waste citizen’s time in seeking for barely found parking spots, car traffic increase, and surge of... 

Eigenvalue analysis is a fundamental tool in control issues, however, in some abnormal matrixes it can lead to an incorrect judgment of the matrix dynamic behavior. Pesudospectra, as an eigenvalue generalization, can provide more extensive information of the system dynamic behavior, whereas, the obtained data from eigenvalue analysis can be incomplete. In applying robust controllers, the concept of uncertainty has been attracted researcher interest in system modelling, nevertheless, the controller implementation may not be fault free or the parameters may vary over time. In this project the aforementioned issue will be studied and additionally, the pseudospectra will be employed to design a...