Sharif Digital Repository

This study used the emulsion liquid membrane method to investigate the extraction and separation of thorium from nitrate solution. According to the results obtained from the studies, Cyanex 272 was a suitable option for selectively extracting thorium. For simultaneous extraction and stripping of thorium from dilute aqueous solutions, an emulsion liquid membrane system consisting of Cyanex 272 as an extractant, Span 80 as a surfactant and sulfuric acid solution as a receiving phase (internal phase) was used. Emulsion liquid membrane method has high mass transfer flux due to high surface to volume ratio, which causes high extraction efficiency and fast transfer of thorium ions from its low... 

One of the novel methods of stabilization of nuclear waste is the use of vitrification technology. In order to stabilize high level wastes (HLLW) in glass, it is required that the elements are in their oxide form. Therefore, it is necessary to evaporate the waste and turn it into a solid form so that the elements can be converted into oxide form in the calcination furnace. Hence, one of the challenges of stabilization is the optimization of evaporation and calcination conditions. In this research, the parameters affecting evaporation were first investigated. Using laboratory measurements of application: temperature (110 to 180 °C), presence of nitric acid (0.5 to 4 mol/L), ratio of zirconium... 

One of the most common spinal surgeries involves spinal fusion or vertebral fixation, which is used to treat various conditions such as intervertebral disc disease, scoliosis (lateral deviation of the spinal column), fractures, infections, or the presence of tumors in the spinal column. In this surgical procedure, the use of pedicle screws and titanium rods prevents motion and friction between two vertebrae. Screws may enter the vertebrae in the wrong position and angle, causing bone weakening, rupture of nerve roots or blood vessels, weakness or lack of sensation in some parts of the body, spinal cord injury, and in severe cases, paralysis of the patient. For this reason, fusion surgery is... 

Solid-State Drives (SSDs) provide high performance, low power consumption, and hence are widely used in the I/O cache of enterprise storage systems and high performance servers. Although employing high performance SSDs in the I/O cache of storage systems significantly improves system performance, it comes with significant reliability threats for write operations upon power failures. In order to provide high level of reliability, storage architectures employ SSDs in I/O cache with RAID-1 configuration, however, such configuration only partially mitigates the reliability issues of the SSDs. In this thesis, we analyze the reliability of SSD-based I/O caches against power outage and high... 

With increasing rate of digital information in the world, design, configuration, and networking of enterprise storage systems has become an essential part in designing data centers. The performance of data storage systems in serving incoming requests is one of the major parameters of such systems. A major metric to measure performance is response time. This parameter is, in particular, crucial in enterprise applications such as financial, credit, multimedia, and real-time applications. A common approach to enhance the performance of enterprise storage systems is improving the hit ratio of the system global memory using prefetching technique. Using prefetching technique, a data block is... 

Nowadays, enterprise storage systems are widely used in data centers such as databases, servers, and bank institutes. Due to mechanical activity of disk drives, these systems are one of the most power consumptive components in data centers. Prefetching and RAID, which are employed to enhance performance, are widely used in data storage systems. These two methods, however, impose significant energy overhead to the system due to the increased disk activity. In this thesis, we first elaborate shortcomings of prefetching and RAID methods. Then, we propose a new energy efficient and RAID-compatible prefetching method (LPTAP), which aims at improving performance and energy consumption. To evaluate... 

There are many parameters which are utilized to obtain a more reasonable performance for structures under earthquake excitations in seismic provisions. It is well recognized that the main character to design of structures under seismic excitation is probabilistic rather than deterministic; therefore, it should be determined if the probability of structural damages is decreased when such parameters change in design of structures. In this thesis, fragility curves are developed in order to evaluate these parameters. Fragility curves are employed for various probability parameters. These diagrams are utilized to demonstrate when a coefficient or a number of parameters are used to improve... 

Data storage systems are an essential part of any Information Technology (IT) infrastructure. Unavailability of these systems can directly lead to service disruption to customers and can be very costly in enterprise applications such as ebanking, online reservation systems, and mobile services. Modeling availability of disk subsystem is a major step in design of data storage systems. Previous modeling techniques have mainly focused on data unavailability or data loss due to double or multiple disk failures. In this thesis, we present both simulation and analytical modeling techniques to investigate the effect of serviceability on the overall availability of disk subsystems. The proposed... 

In recent years, emerging Non-Volatile Memories (NVMs) have become promising alternatives for existing memory technologies. Due to shortcomings of SRAM memory in nanometer era,NVMs such as Phase-Change Memory (PCM) can be used in configuration memories of Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs). Despite prominent features of emerging NVMs, they suffer from high write-power, high write-latency, and limited number of reliable write opera-tions. In addition, a dedicated Peripheral Circuit (PC) which is required to convert the NVM state to the equivalent voltage level can impose significant area and power overheads to FPGAs.In this thesis, a reliable power-efficient hybrid architecture employing... 

Performance and reliability are the major concerns in design of data storage systems. Using Redundant Array of Independent Disks (RAID) can enhance both performance and reliability. A commonly used configuration in RAID arrays is erasure codes to further enhance system reliability. Due to promising advantages of Solid-State Drives (SSDs)such as low power, shock resistance, and high I/O performance, designers have been encouraged to replace Hard Disk Drives (HDDs) by SSDs in RAID arrays. SSDs, however, suffer from limited endurance due to erase-before-write operation.In this thesis, we investigate the effect of stripe unite size and the number of disks of a RAID array on the endurance of SSDs...