Sharif Digital Repository

This paper presents a high performance real-time simulator for power electronic systems applications and primarily intended for controller hardware-in-the-loop (CHIL) testing. The novelty of the proposed simulator resides in the massively parallel hardware architecture that efficiently exploits fine-grained parallelism without imposing severe communication overhead time that can limit the performance. The simulator enables the use of a nanosecond range simulation timestep to simulate power electronic systems. Through the use of this nanosecond range simulation timestep, the simulator minimizes the error arising from the intersimulation timestep switching phenomenon associated with CHIL. The... 

In this work, the influence of the clearance and post-braze heat treatment on the microstructure of 4130 steel joint brazed by BNi-4 filler metal was investigated. Samples with different clearances were heated to 1100°C and hold for 9 min. Then, some were reheated to 800°C(2hr) and 800°C(2hr)+1000°C(2hr), cycle 1 and cycle 2, respectively. Microscopy techniques and micro-hardness test were used to evaluate the microstructures. Results suggested that in this case 25μm clearance can be considered as the optimum value. Also, it was found that high temperature post-braze heat treatment can be applied as a useful technique for decreasing the fraction of the brittle phases at the joint main body  

Air passages of an aircraft fuel system are manufactured from 4130 steel tubes brazed using BNi-4 filler metal. It was observed that brazed tubes leak after flying about 100 h. In this case study, microscopy techniques and hardness measurements were employed to identify the root cause of this failure. It was found that wide joint clearance promotes brittle phases at the joint centerline which can act as crack nucleation sites under thermal expansion and misalignment stresses. Based on the obtained results, joint clearance was reduced to optimum value. This reduction prohibited the occurrence of leakage and solved the problem  

In software testing, different metrics are proposed to predict and compare test suites effectiveness. In this regard, Mutation Score (MS) is one of most accurate metrics. However, calculating MS needs executing test suites many times and it is not commonly used in industry. On the other hand, Line Coverage (LC) is a widely used metric which is calculated by executing test suites only once, although it is not as accurate as MS in terms of predicting and comparing test suites effectiveness. In this paper, we propose a novel test coverage metric, called Program State Coverage (PSC), which improves the accuracy of LC. PSC works almost the same as LC and it can be calculated by executing test... 

Very fine alumina nanoparticles were loaded in novolac type phenolic resin (PF) using solution mixing method. The concentration of nanoalumina in PF was varied between 2.5 to 20 wt%. All the compounds were compression molded and then subjected to scanning electron microscopy (SEM), tensile, flexural, and dynamic mechanical analysis (DMA) tests. SEM analysis showed that the nanoalumina were dispersed uniformly at low concentrations, however, at high concentrations, dispersion was suppressed leading to agglomerates in the composites. Mechanical testing revealed that the nanoalumina had a great influence on the strength and stiffness of PF resin particularly at concentrations below 5 wt%.... 

In this study, the authors propose an analytical model to evaluate the maximum stable throughput for unicast services in vehicular ad hoc networks. In this respect, the authors employ two queueing networks (QNs) to model the mobility patterns of the vehicles as well as the multi-hop packet transmission scenario. In the proposed model, the authors map the features of IEEE 802.11, as well as the details of multi-hop packet transmission, regarding the dynamic status of vehicles, onto suitable parameters of the QNs. In the authors' modelling approach, they take the details of MAC and routing schemes into account by classifying the vehicles based on their mobility patterns and considering their... 

Injection molding is one of the most important manufacturing processes for mass production of complex plastic parts. In this study, mold filling is simulated by using the OpenFOAM software for Non- isothermal Newtonian fluid. The OpenFOAM is an open source software that is used in Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) tools. The studied mold shape has a rectangular structure with a gate for Newtonian fluid injection. The simulation carried out at non-isothermal conditions and two-dimensional flow is considered. The velocity, shear stress and temperature changes in different parts of the mold are critically studied. We show that vortex formation plays an important role on changes of shear stress... 

The minimum cost subgraph for joint distributed source and network coding has been studied using a linear programming approach. This problem considers some statistically correlated information sources in a network, where sending over each link has a defined cost. The desired solution to this problem is a set of coding rates over the graph links, that minimizes the total communication costs. But in this problem, the placement of the sources is pre-defined, which is not necessarily optimal. In this paper, for the first time, we find a "good" placement for the sources using a genetic programming approach. This problem can be seen as the generalized mirror sites problem, where sources are not... 

Context: During the development process of a software program, regression testing is used to ensure that the correct behavior of the software is retained after updates to the source code. This regression testing becomes costly over time as the number of test cases increases and it makes sense to prioritize test cases in order to execute fault-detecting test cases as soon as possible. There are many coverage-based test case prioritization (TCP) methods that only use the code coverage data to prioritize test cases. By incorporating the fault-proneness estimations of code units into the coverage-based TCP methods, we can improve such techniques. Objective: In this paper, we aim to propose an... 

Few works has been focused on the problem of joint distributed data compression and network coding. In this paper we give some examples showing the advantage of broadcast nature of wireless environment as a basis for joint codes design. Also we show that joint coding is possible in the case of multiple unicasts. The idea of this paper can be exploited in an opportunistic manner. Actually, the foundation of our idea is nothing but combining opportunistic network coding (COPE) and distributed source coding using syndromes (DISCUS) for wireless applications. © 2009 IEEE  

Human parvovirus B19 (B19) is a small, non-enveloped virus and belongs to Parvoviridae family. B19 persists in many tissues such as thyroid tissue and even thyroid cancer. The main aim of this study was to determine the presence of B19, its association with increased inflammation in thyroid tissue, and thus its possible role in thyroid cancer progression. Studies have shown that virus replication in non-permissive tissue leads to overexpression of non-structural protein and results in upregulation of proinflammatory cytokines such as interleukin 6 and tumor necrosis factor alpha. A total of 36 paraffin-embedded thyroid specimens and serum were collected from patients and 12 samples were used... 

This paper approaches the topic of protection system reliability from an economic point of view by 1) designing an optimal modern protective relay based on a prescribed level of reliability subject to economic constraints and 2) determining optimal routine test intervals by balancing the cost of routine tests and losses due to relay failure. This paper proposes a method that enables the designer to optimally select hardware and software components of a digital protective relay to gain the highest possible overall reliability with a restricted budget. This design can be viewed as a reliability and redundancy allocation problem for which a new easy-to-implement algorithm is proposed. In... 

Protective relay technologies have evolved from single-function electromechanical and static relays to modern multifunction digital relays over the past few years. Protection systems play a vital role in maintaining a desirable level of reliability in power systems. Thus, their own reliability should be evaluated and any cause of their malfunction should be fully comprehended. In this paper, a new reliability model is proposed that associates protection system failures to four main causes: 1) relay hardware, 2) relay software, 3) ancillary equipment, and 4) human error. In addition, this model can take other aspects of the protection system into consideration, such as human error during... 

Brake friction materials filled with nanoalumina were produced by both conventional and solvent-assisted mixing methods. It was shown that nanoalumina loading led to the reduction of friction coefficient and improvement in mechanical, wear and thermal behaviors. Such behavior was attributed to the role of nanoalumina in producing stable friction layer and easy conduction path in matrix. It was postulated that nanoalumina is able to attach on the surface of microalumina facilitating the rolling of microalumina at interface. Solution-processed samples exhibited lower improvement in tribological and mechanical properties compared to the conventional mixing due to the limited interaction between... 

Protective relay technologies have evolved from single-function electromechanical and static relays to modern multifunction digital relays over the past few years. Protection systems play a vital role in maintaining a desirable level of reliability in power systems. Thus, their own reliability should be evaluated and any cause of their malfunction should be fully comprehended. In this paper, a new reliability model is proposed that associates protection system failures to four main causes: 1) relay hardware, 2) relay software, 3) ancillary equipment, and 4) human error. In addition, this model can take other aspects of the protection system into consideration, such as human error during... 

We study drag reduction of a uniform flow over a flat surface due to a series of rectangular microgrooves created on the surface. The results reveal that making grooves on the surface usually leads to the generation of secondary vortices inside the grooves that, in turn, decreases the friction drag force and increases the pressure drag force. By increasing the thickness of the grooves to the thickness of the obstacle, the pressure drag increases due to the enhancement of the generated vortices and the occurrence of separation phenomenon and the friction drag reduces due to a decrease of the velocity gradient on the surface. In addition, by increasing the grooves depth ratio, the pressure... 

The protection system plays a vital role in maintaining a high degree of service reliability in present-day power systems. Considerable work has been done to examine different aspects of protection systems and their associated reliability. All of the reliability predictive methods are based solely on equipment failures, neglecting the human component of the protection system. In this paper, a modified Markov model is presented that incorporates human errors in reliability evaluation of protective devices. Two main types of relay failure (failure to operate and inadvertent operation) are taken into account in the proposed model. The model also considers routine test inspections, the...