Sharif Digital Repository

In this work bioleaching of vanadium has been done from Saghand Ore (Anomaly II). Leaching of vanadium was done in several stages. First, Acidithiobacillus ferrooxidans and Acidithiobacillus thiooxxidans were used for dissolution of pure vanadium pentoxide and it was observed that these bacteria are able to dissolve and reduce vanadium with high efficiency. After that these bacteria were employed to leaching of vanadium from ore; however there were no results by those experiments and no vanadium dissolved in liquor although bacterial activity was visible. In the second stage, oxalic acid 0.1 M as an organic acid and three inorganic acids, namely sulfuric, hydrochloridric and nitric acids, in... 

Statistical studies indicate the fact that in Iran, like many other developing countries, a significant percentage of buildings are made of traditional materials and most of them are adobe buildings especially in rural areas. Furthermore, geological data indicates that Iran is located in alps-Himalayas seismic zone and exposed by destructive earthquakes and adobe buildings suffer the most damages comparing with other type of the structures. According to these explanations, this research deals with adobe buildings behavior and provides solutions for reinforcing them and improving the seismic response of these buildings. These studies include numerical modeling with finite elements methods by... 

In this thesis we consider the problem of distributed computation by many processors.We mainly concentrate on matrix multiplication problem in this thesis because of its importance. A distributed system consists of N worker processors and one master processor. The master processor should distribute the computation between workers and after computation in each of them, collect the results. In this thesis, we are going to mitigate the effect of straggler processors by using coding methods. Straggler processors can cause delays in the computation time.In this thesis, we firstly introduce a method to multiply any number of matrices in each other. The proposed method occurred in one shot without... 

Abstract The problem of competetive facility location can be defined as follows: There are a number of customers in the form of points in space, and two players arrange a number of facilities in the form of points in space, given some limitations, respectively. Each customer’s connection to each facility has a cost for the customer and an advantage for the facility, and each customer wants to be connected to at most one of the facilities which has the lowest cost for him. The goal is to find the strategy of placing the facilities and determining the cost which the facility receives from the customer, in such a way that the player’s profit is maximised.In this thesis, we first sought to... 

Zero knowledge proofs allow a person (prover) to convince another person (verifier) that he has performed a specific computation on a secret data correctly, and has obtained a true answer, without having to disclose the secret data. QAP (Quadratic Arithmetic Program) based zkSNARKs (zero knowledge Succinct Non-interactive Argument of Knowledge) are a type of zero knowledge proof. They have several properties that make them attractive in practice, e.g. verifier's work is very easy. So they are used in many areas such as Blockchain and cloud computing. But yet prover's work in QAP based zkSNARKs is heavy, therefore, it may not be possible for a prover with limited processing resource to run... 

The main goal of current investigation was partial reduction of Fe2O3 available in Hematite-rich ore to Magnetite by Fludization Bed method. The reductive gas, CO, was produced by incomplete combustion of Acetylene and Airmixed in inappropriate ratio. X-Ray Diffraction and X-Ray Florescence analyses were implemented in order to conducting qualitative analysis of present phases before and after reduction of the ore. Quantitative analysis of the same phases was also conducted by Titration. The latter analysis revealed the precise magnitude of available iron in each of the oxide containing phases. The chemical composition of the reactor gas was also determined before and after reduction... 

Lightweight clients are a type of blockchain users who do not store all the blocks in the blockchain due to limited resources. These users store only a small part of each block and when needed, request transactions from full nodes that store the entire blockchain. These users have no role in block validation and only want to receive transactions related to their addresses with proof of the inclusion in the block from full nodes.Since light clients rely on full nodes for receiving transactions, their privacy against full nodes is important. The current implementation of Bitcoin uses Bloom filters for privacy, but this offers very little privacy to the users.In this thesis, we study the... 

Nowadays, we are forced to use distributed computing due to the growth of data, the challenge of storing and processing it, as well as the emergence of new problems in machine learning and the complexity of the models. In distributed computing, the computation is per- formed by a distributed system consisting of several worker nodes such that, the main task is divided into several smaller tasks and assigned to each worker node. Then, different worker nodes will cooperate to accomplish the main task. Although distributed systems are efficient in solving problems and dealing with the mentioned challenges, they are vulnerable to the presence of stragglers, adversarial worker nodes, high... 

Payment channel networks (PCNs) are a promising technology to improve the scalability of cryptocurrencies. Users can send instant and almost free transactions via payment channel networks and, at the same time, enjoy the security guarantees of Blockchains. In order to open a mutual payment channel, two users should send a ``channel creation" transaction to the underlying Blockchain. Through this transaction, two parties deposit some money on the Blockchain. This money, which we call the channel's capacity, can be used to send off-chain transactions between the two users. After the channel creation, the channel-holders can send each other off-chain transactions by forwarding the money back... 

In this thesis, we argue that in many basic algorithms for machine learning, including support vector machine (SVM) for classification, principal component analysis (PCA) for dimensionality reduction, and regression for dependency estimation, we need the inner products of the data samples, rather than the data samples themselves. Motivated by the above observation, we introduce the problem of private inner product retrieval for distributed machine learning, where we have a system including a database of some files, duplicated across some non-colluding servers. A user intends to retrieve a subset of specific size of the inner products of the data files with minimum communication load, without... 

Nowadays we are witnessing the emergence of machine learning in various applications. One of the key problems in data science and machine learning is the problem of dimensionality reduction, which deals with finding a mapping that embeds samples to a lower-dimensional space such that, the relationships between the samples and their properties are preserved in the secondary space as much as possible. Obtaining such mapping is essential in today's high-dimensional settings. Moreover, due to the large volume of data and high-dimensional samples, it is infeasible or insecure to process and store all data in a single machine. As a result, we need to process data in a distributed manner.In this... 

Power system frequency regulation entitled load frequency control (LFC) has been one of the important control problems in electric power system design and operation. Off-normal frequency can directly impact on power system operation and system reliability. A large frequency deviation can damage equipment, degrade load performance, cause the transmission lines to be overloaded and can interfere with system protection schemes, ultimately leading to an unstable condition for the power system . On the other hand, the increasing need for electrical energy in the 21st century, as well as limited fossil fuel reserves and the increasing concerns with environmental issues for the reduction of carbon... 

The  aim  of  this  work  is  to  investigate  some  theoretical  models  developed  in  recent years for describing electronic correlation and apply them to some special problems  and  metallicity  and  insulating  behavior  of  one  type  of  paramagnetic  systems. One  of  the  vast‐applied  and  effective  routines  for  investigating  the  strongly  correlated electron systems is Dynamical Mean Field Theory (DMFT). In the first part,  the  equations  of  DMFT  are  solved  on  nearly  real  frequency  axis  with  a  effective and more reliable solver a little parameter γ above the real axis. This approach  appears  fine  structures  that  can’t  be  captured  with  the ... 

In this thesis, we consider a network creation game in which, each player (vertex) has a limited budget to establish links to other players. In our model, each link has a unit cost and each agent tries to minimize its cost which is its local diameter or its total distance to other players in the (undirected) underlying graph of the created network. Two variants of the game are studied: in the MAX version, the cost incurred to a vertex is the maximum distance between that vertex and other vertices, and in the SUM version, the cost incurred to a vertex is the sum of distances between that vertex and other vertices. We prove that in both versions pure Nash equilibria exist, but the problem of... 

Controlling damage level of structures for an earthquake with certain intensity is the main purpose in seismic performance based design. This is done by estimating and confining the structure displacements and related global and local response parameters. Even though nonlinear time history analysis method is the most exact method for predicting seismic behavior of structures, but its application is limited because of being complex. Nonlinear static analysis procedure (Pushover analysis) which is based on analyzing the structure subjected to the incremental lateral load is an alternative method that has been recommended by recent structural codes. In order to consider the soil-structure... 

Let P be a set of points in the plane, each equipped with a directional antenna that can cover a sector of angle and range r. In the symmetric model of communication, two antennas u and v can communicate to each other, if and only if v lies in u’s coverage area and vice versa. In this paper, we introduce the concept of fault-tolerant spanners for directional antennas, which enables us to construct communication networks that retain their connectivity and spanning ratio even if a subset of antennas are removed from the network. We show how to orient the antennas with angle and range r to obtain a k-fault-tolerant spanner for any positive integer k. For ⩾ , we show that the range 13 for the... 

Soil-structure interaction has significant effect on dynamic behavior of the super structure. This effect is usually investigated in two separate parts, i.e., the Kinematic Interaction effect and the Inertial Interaction effect. The first modifies the input ground motion to the foundation as a result of difference in soil and foundation stiffness. The later, i.e., the II effect, introduces the effect of soil flexibility and radiation of waves into the supporting medium on the response of the structure. These effects are usually considered by introducing a replacement oscillator with modified natural period and damping ratio subjected...