Sharif Digital Repository

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to determine why female labor force participation in Iran has been less than 20 percent. Design/methodology/approach: The authors estimate a structural dynamic matching model of female participation using individual panel data in Iran. The study incorporates many factors such as wage, child cost, education, spouse employment and job market search parameters. Findings: The study finds that gender discrimination in job finding has the biggest effect in reducing the rate of women's participation. If all market differences disappear, the female participation rate will increase by 12 percentage points to almost 27 percent, which is still much lower than that... 

Mechanistic modelling is an engineering approach to simulate reasonable physical and chemical processes to develop a model to describe the behaviour of a system. Mathematical models are commonly adopted to explore the physical limits of a process, and are applied to process development, optimization and control. In this work, the population balance model and the moment technique have been utilized to model a suspension polymerization reactor and predict the dynamic evolution of particle size and molecular weight distributions. These distributions are two important factors that affect the physical, rheological and mechanical properties of a polymer, and its final product quality. The cell... 

In this article we present a new scheme to support multirate and multi-quality-of-service transmission in passive optical networks based on a hybrid wavelength-division multiplexing/optical code-division multiplexing scheme. The idea is to use multilength variable-weight optical orthogonal codes as signature sequences of a hybrid WDM/OCDM system. To provide the requested classes of service, the code weight and code length of MLVW-OOCs are designed based on the characteristics of the requested classes of service. In order to mitigate multiple access interference, we propose to utilize a multilevel signaling technique and interference remover structure based on advanced optical logic gate... 

In this paper, the power quality of a single-phase photovoltaic grid connected inverter when uses active islanding detection methods is investigated. Two main groups of these methods are analyzed in this paper. The main focus is on the output power quality of PV sources for these methods. Also the variation of output current THD, while the output power changes, is explored. The variation of output current THD is measured when the parameters of active islanding detection method are changed, and the limitation of these parameters for complying power quality standards in the nominal output power is detected. ©2009 IEEE  

This paper presents a decentralized self-adjusting reactive power controller for the autonomous operation of a multi-bus medium voltage (MV) microgrid. The main objective of the proposed control strategy of each distributed generation (DG) unit is to compensate the reactive power of its local loads and to share the reactive power of the nonlocal loads among itself and other DG units. The proposed control strategy includes an improved droop controller whose parameters are adjusted according to the reactive power of the local loads. A virtual inductive impedance loop is augmented to the voltage controller to enhance the steady state and transient responses of the proposed reactive power... 

This paper proposes a new control strategy for the islanded operation of a multi-bus medium voltage (MV) microgrid. The microgrid consists of several dispatchable electronically-coupled distributed generation (DG) units. Each DG unit supplies a local load which can be unbalanced due to the inclusion of single-phase loads. The proposed control strategy of each DG comprises a proportional resonance (PR) controller with an adjustable resonance frequency, a droop control strategy, and a negative-sequence impedance controller (NSIC). The PR and droop controllers are, respectively, used to regulate the load voltage and share the average power components among the DG units. The NSIC is used to... 

This paper presents a robust dc-link voltage as well as a current control strategy for a bidirectional interlink converter (BIC) in a hybrid ac/dc microgrid. To enhance the dc-bus voltage control, conventional methods strive to measure and feedforward the load or source power in the dc-bus control scheme. However, the conventional feedforward-based approaches require remote measurement with communications. Moreover, conventional methods suffer from stability and performance issues, mainly due to the use of the small-signal-based control design method. To overcome these issues, in this paper, the power from DG units of the dc subgrid imposed on the BIC is considered an unmeasurable... 

This paper proposes a frequency control strategy for an islanded inverter-based microgrid which based on the priority of supply, has got two distinct types of loads, namely sensitive and deferrable. The proposed strategy consists of primary and secondary levels of generation control supported by a loadshedding scheme. The primary control regulates the output power of the distributed generator (DG) units to be proportional to their ratings while secondary control has got the duty of frequency restoration after each load change. Functionality of these two levels is demonstrated to be independent of each other. Both controls are in distributed forms which have no need of communication... 

This paper presents a robust dc-link voltage as well as a current control strategy for a bidirectional interlink converter (BIC) in a hybrid ac/dc microgrid. To enhance the dc-bus voltage control, conventional methods strive to measure and feedforward the load or source power in the dc-bus control scheme. However, the conventional feedforward-based approaches require remote measurement with communications. Moreover, conventional methods suffer from stability and performance issues, mainly due to the use of the small-signal-based control design method. To overcome these issues, in this paper, the power from DG units of the dc subgrid imposed on the BIC is considered an unmeasurable... 

This paper presents a new nonlinear voltage control strategy based on backstepping control and a high-order sliding mode differentiator for an islanded microgrid. The microgrid consists of multiple distributed generation (DG) units with an arbitrary configuration that can be parametrically uncertain or topologically unknown. The proposed controller robustly regulates the microgrid voltages in the presence of parametric uncertainties, unmodeled dynamics, load imbalances, and nonlinear loads with harmonic/interharmonic currents. In contrast to existing methods, the controller does not need to know the frequency of harmonic and interharmonic current of microgrid loads that lead to the reduction... 

This paper presents a distributed, robust, finite-time secondary control for both voltage and frequency restoration of an islanded microgrid with droop-controlled inverter-based distributed generators (DGs). The distributed cooperative secondary control is fully distributed (i.e., uses only the information of neighboring DGs that can communicate with one another through a sparse communication network). In contrast to existing distributed methods that require a detailed model of the system (such as line impedances, loads, other DG units parameters, and even the microgrid configuration, which are practically unknown), the proposed protocols are synthesized by considering the unmodeled... 

This paper presents a new nonlinear current control strategy based on backstepping control and high-order sliding mode differentiator in order to employ distributed generation (DG) unit interfacing converters to actively compensate harmonics/interharmonics of local loads. The converter-based DG unit is connected to a weak grid (with uncertain impedance) and local load (that can be parametrically uncertain and topologically unknown) through an LCL filter. The proposed strategy robustly regulates the inverter output currents and delivers pure sinusoidal, three-phase balanced currents to the grid. The new controller demonstrates the robust performance and robust stability of the DG unit system... 

This paper proposes a new distributed cooperative secondary control for both frequency and voltage restoration of an islanded microgrid with droop-controlled, inverter-based distributed generations (DGs). Existing distributed methods commonly design secondary control based on the minimum real part of the nonzero Laplacian matrix eigenvalues related to the microgrid communication graph, which, however, is global information. In contrast to the existing distributed methods, in this paper we design a fully distributed adaptive control based on the dynamic model of DG units and on information from neighboring units. Therefore, the proposed control scheme increases the system reliability,... 

This study addresses the robust stability analysis for an islanded microgrid with droop-controlled inverter-based distributed generators (DGs). Owing to large load changes, microgrid structure reconfiguration, and higher-power demands, the low-frequency (LF) dominant modes of a microgrid stir toward unstable zone and make the system more oscillatory or even unstable. In this study, a robust two-degree-of-freedom (2DOF) decentralised droop controller, which is the combination of the conventional droop with a robust transient droop function, is utilised for each inverter-based DG unit. Unlike conventional tuning of 2DOF droop controllers, a new design procedure is proposed to robustly... 

This paper presents an effective control strategy for autonomous operation of a multi-bus medium voltage (MV) microgrid (MG) consisting of several dispatchable distributed generation (DG) units. Each electronically-coupled DG unit supplies the loads which can be unbalanced due to the inclusion of single-phase loads. The proportional resonance (PR) and droop controllers are, respectively, used to regulate the load voltage and share the average powers among the DG units. The virtual negative-sequence impedance controller (VNSIC) is proposed to effectively compensate the negative-sequence currents of the unbalanced loads. Moreover, the VNSIC minimizes the negative-sequence currents in the MV... 

This paper presents an effective current injection method for a single phase grid-connected PV inverter with LCL filter. The main objective of the proposed control strategy is to compensate the resonance effect of the LCL filter. In the proposed control strategy, a resonance compensator is augmented to the conventional proportional resonance (PR) controller to attenuate current oscillations in resonance frequency of LCL filter. The proposed strategy robustly regulates the output current of grid connected inverter in various grid impedances and provides a high quality current injection capability for the PV inverter in harmonic polluted condition of the grid voltage. The performance of the... 

This paper presents a control strategy for an islanded medium voltage microgrid to coordinate hybrid power source (HPS) units and to control interfaced multilevel inverters under unbalanced and nonlinear load conditions. The proposed HPS systems are connected to the loads through a cascaded H-bridge (CHB) multilevel inverter. The CHB multilevel inverters increase the output voltage level and enhance power quality. The HPS employs fuel cell (FC) and photovoltaic sources as the main and supercapacitors as the complementary power sources. Fast transient response, high performance, high power density, and low FC fuel consumption are the main advantages of the proposed HPS system. The proposed...