Sharif Digital Repository

In the present paper, several experimental and theoretical studies conducted on the thermal conductivity of nanofluids are represented and investigated. Based on the reviewed studies, various factors affect thermal conductivity of nanofluids such as temperature, the shape of nanoparticles, concentration and etc. Results indicated the increase in temperature and concentration of nanoparticles usually leads to the higher thermal conductivity of nanofluids. In addition, it is concluded that there are some novel approaches in order to obtain nanofluids with more appropriate thermal properties including using binary fluids as the base fluid or utilizing hybrid nanofluids. © 2018 Elsevier B.V  

Hybrid nanofluids have several advantages compared with the conventional types due to their modified properties. Their enhanced thermophysical and rheological properties make them more appropriate for solar energy systems. In this review paper, an overview of solar energy systems is represented, and afterwards, applications of hybrid nanofluids in various solar technologies, especially solar thermal, are reviewed. Comparison between the nanofluidic systems, and the conventional ones is performed in order to gain a deeper insight into the advantages of using nanofluids. According to the results of the reviewed studies, the most important reason for performance enhancement of nanofluidic solar... 

Pulsating Heat Pipes (PHPs) are cooling devices that are compact in size and have an ability to transfer heat in low temperature differences. Working fluids strongly affect the thermal performance of PHPs. In this paper, effects of some thermophysical parameters relating to working fluids, such as boiling point, latent heat of vaporization, surface tension, thermal conductivity and dynamic viscosity, are presented based on experimental and numerical studies done in recent years. Addition of nanoparticles to fluids, or making nanofuild, is a new method of improving thermophysical properties of fluids. Recently, many studies are carried out on thermophysical properties of nano-fuild. Results... 

The concerns regarding the consumption of traditional fuels such as oil and coal have driven the proposals for several cleaner alternatives in recent years. Hydrogen energy is one of the most attractive alternatives for the currently used fossil fuels with several superiorities, such as zero-emission and high energy content. Hydrogen has numerous advantages compared to conventional fuels and, as such, has been employed in gas turbines (GTs) in recent years. The main benefit of using hydrogen in power generation with the GT is the considerably lower emission of greenhouse gases. The performance of the GTs using hydrogen as a fuel is influenced by several factors, including the performance of... 

In this study, a mixture of nano-encapsulated phase change materials in water has been used as the working fluid in a pulsating heat pipe in order to investigate its thermal performance. The results of the experiments showed that using the nano-encapsulated paraffin dispersed in water as working fluid improves heat transfer and decreases the thermal resistance of the pulsating heat pipe. On the other hand, among the tested concentrations for nano-encapsulated paraffin, there is an optimal value in which increasing the concentration causes an increase in the thermal resistance of the pulsating heat pipe due to the increased dynamic viscosity of the fluid. Enhancement in the thermal... 

Pulsating heat pipes (PHPs) are compact cooling equipment used for various applications. This type of heat pipes can be used in renewable energy systems, cooling electronic devices, heat recovery systems and many other applications. Since PHPs have superior thermal performance, by applying them in energy systems enhance their efficiency. In addition, PHPs are a reliable medium for cooling various devices which have high heat flux. In this study, various works conducted on the applications of PHPs are reviewed and analyzed. It is concluded that PHPs are efficient and reliable devices for utilization in various energy systems. Moreover, at very low temperatures, such as cryogenic applications,... 

For the purposes of lowering environmental emission cost and increasing economic profit, energy efficient combined heat and power (CHP) units can be integrated with conventional separate heat and power production units to meet heat and power demands. The goal of this study is to develop and examine a novel heuristic and deterministic optimization algorithm for solving the profit-based unit commitment (PBUC) problem for a generation company with integrated CHP-thermal-heat only system for (i) satisfying demands for heat and power, (ii) selling spinning reserve for power, (iii) reducing environmental CO2 emission cost, and (iv) accounting for valve-point effects for steam turbines. For... 

In this paper, we propose a new scenario in order to increase the total throughput of a WLAN. In this scenario, some secondary users (SUs) are considered in a primary WLAN such that SUs cooperate with primary users (PUs) in transmitting the primary packets. Each SU sends its packets as well as the primary packets collided at the access point, but overheard successfully at the SU, by random access the primary WLAN. We show that SUs cooperation is able to compensate their adverse effect in the WLAN, so total throughput in the WLAN increases without a significant degrading effect for the stability region of PUs. To this end, we use an analytical model based on open queueing networks. By solving... 

One of the beneficial impacts of Distributed generation (DG) units on electrical network is power loss reduction in the distribution feeder on which DG is located. In this paper the effect of DG on power losses of a distribution feeder with a combination of uniformly distributed and lumped loads is investigated, and a mathematical model of power loss reduction as a function of DG and the feeder parameters is extracted. Then, based on the derived formula, optimum conditions of utilizing and locating the DG units are obtained. © 2006 IEEE  

When an integer order linear time invariant system possesses unrepeated pure imaginary poles it can generate oscillatory response which is represented by invariant closed contours in the phase plane. In linear time invariant fractional order systems with the same property, due to their special characteristics, this behavior will be more complicated and the contours would not be invariant. In this paper we will investigate the behavior of fractional order systems under such conditions  

This study is an extension of our previous work that was conducted on the aerodynamic characteristics of an ultra light weight airplane, which could be a human-powered airplane or an unmanned-aerial vehicle. One of the major aerodynamic tasks which should be done in this type of airplane is to reduce drag coefficient. The mainly effectual strategy for drag reduction is to contemplate on the components that make up the largest percentage of the overall drag and take into account that small improvements on large quantities can become significant aerodynamic improvements. Our experience showed that the use of light material in constructing human-powered airplanes and unmanned-air-vehicles has... 

A superhydrophobic nanocomposite coating was fabricated using a simple procedure. The nanocomposite is composed of an acrylic copolymer and modified silica nanoparticles. The acrylic copolymer was prepared by free radical copolymerization of methyl methacrylate and dodeycl methacrylate monomers. Silica nanoparticles were synthesized and modified with an alkyl silane reagent, hexadecyltrimethoxysilane. A mixture of acrylic copolymer and modified silica nanoparticles, dispersed in dichloromethane, was then sprayed on glass and filter paper surface. Chemical composition and structure of the coatings were investigated by FTIR, FESEM, AFM, 1H-NMR and GPC. The wettability of the prepared coating... 

Adaptive application detection in today's high-bandwidth networks is resource consuming and inaccurate due to the high volume, velocity, and variety characteristics of the networks traffic. To generate a robust classifier for identifying applications over encrypted traffic, we proposed DSCA as a DPI-based Stream Classification Algorithm. DSCA utilizes applications detected by the DPI, Deep Packet Inspection technique, as ground truth data and updates the classification model accordingly. To reduce the classification algorithms overhead without accuracy reduction, a feature selection method, named CfsSubsetEval, is deployed in DSCA. The proposed approach is implemented via the MOA tool and... 

This paper deals with the identification of fractional order systems via orthogonal rational functions. These functions have widely been used in system identification of classical integer order systems. It has been shown that due to some properties such as the presence of non-exponentional aperiodic multimodes in the fractional order systems, it is much better to use fractional orthogonal rational functions in approximation of these systems. One problem which arises in this area is the estimation of fractional order of these orthogonal rational functions. In the existing methods, these parameters have been found by trial and error which requires a large amount of calculations. To reduce the... 

There has been much interest, recently, towards exploiting the Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) technique in radar. It is shown that using multiple antennas at transmit and receive sides can improve the performance of the system. However, in order to analyze the system's performance, its ambiguity function, i.e. the ambiguity function of a MIMO radar, is needed to be defined. In this paper, beginning from the information theoretic definitions, we derive such function, specifically for a MIMO radar with widely separated antennas  

It has been shown that using multiple antennas in a radar system improves the performance considerably, since multiple target echoes are received from different aspect angles of the target. In this way, the target detection is improved. However, when using multiple antennas, some problems, such as designing the transmit signals, synchronization, etc. emerge that should be solved. One of such problems is the receiver placement. Receiver placement deals with choosing a proper position for the receive antenna in order to optimize the whole system's performance. In this paper, a receiver placement procedure based on improving the radar ambiguity function is proposed for the case of a multisite... 

By employing the MIMO (multiple-input-multiple-output) technology in radar, some new problems emerged, that, in order to benefit the MIMO gains in radar, it was necessary to solve them suitably. One of such obstacles is determining the positions of receive antennas in a MIMO radar system with widely separated antennas (WS MIMO radar), since it is shown that the antennas' positions affect the whole system's performance considerably. In this study, a proper receivers' positioning procedure is proposed. To do this end, four criteria are developed based on the proposed MIMO detector and the MIMO ambiguity function. The simulations verify that the proposed positioning procedure improves the... 

This paper investigates the dynamical behaviour of the fractional delayed damped Mathieu equation. This system includes three different phenomena (fractional order, time delay, parametric resonance). The method of harmonic balance is employed to achieve approximate expressions for the transition curves in the parameter plane. The n = 0 and n = 1 transition curves (both lower and higher order approximations) are obtained. The dependencies of these curves on the system parameters and fractional orders are determined. Previous results for the transition curves reported for the damped Mathieu equation, delayed second-order oscillator, and fractional Mathieu equation are confirmed as special... 

A noncovalent functionalization of the edges of reduced graphene oxide (RGO) with β-cyclodextrin-graft-hyperbranched polyglycerol (β-CD-g-HPG) was successfully performed via a host-guest interaction. The results showed that β-CD-g-HPG disperses the graphene sheets better than pure β-CD or HPG. The resulted supramolecular structure is stable in neutral water medium more than one week. However, in acidic medium the host-guest interaction is collapsed and graphene nanosheets precipitate. © 2017, Copyright © Taylor & Francis