Sharif Digital Repository

Ground Source Heat Pumps (GSHP), as a renewable source heating, ventilating, and air conditioning (HVAC) technology, has the highest energy efficiency among different heat pump types. One of the major drawbacks of GSHPs is the long-term ground temperature variations as a result of heat accumulation or depletion in the ground. This contribution puts forward a novel ground thermal recovery system for horizontal ground heat exchangers in a hot climate. The proposed recovery system consists of open-loop horizontal Ground-Air Heat Exchangers (GAHEs) that are buried between the horizontal Ground-Water Heat Exchangers (GWHEs). A fan supplies ambient air to the GAHE pipes when the soil around GWHE... 

Due to 18000 MW power consumption of cooling systems from the total Iranian electricity consumption in 2016 and hitting a new peak in 2017, the need for finding other alternatives that consume less electrical energy is inevitable. Hence, instead of buildings new power plants, only to meet the demand at the peak of power consumption, using new solutions to reduce consumption seems more beneficial. One way to reduce consumption is to switch to ejector refrigeration systems. One of the main advantages of these systems is their ability to cooling using low-grade waste energies or solar energy (as a heat source below 80℃). However, in absorption systems, the minimum temperature of the heat source... 

In response to pressing energy crises and environmental concerns, enhancing the performance of existing energy conversion systems, such as gas turbines, and tapping into renewable resources have become critical imperatives. Escalating ambient temperatures poses a notable challenge, hampering the efficiency of gas turbines. This study rigorously explores the feasibility of Earth to Air Heat Exchangers (EAHEs) as a pragmatic solution to cool gas turbine inlet air. This study has two main parts. In the first part, this study puts forward a novel hybrid analytical-numerical model for predicting the performance of HGHEs and in the second part, an exhaustive techno-economic analysis is employed to... 

The solar-driven humidification-dehumidification desalination system with a geothermal dehumidifier (SD-HDH-GD) has been given special attention, for producing drinking water and subsurface irrigation applications. This contribution scrutinizes the performance of the geothermal dehumidifier of the SD-HDH-GD system. To this aim, a comprehensive three-dimensional transient computational fluid dynamics model of the geothermal dehumidifier and the surrounding soil is developed. An experimental setup is established to verify the developed numerical model. At first, the performance of the system in a short-term period of 12 hours is investigated, and the effect of several operation parameters is... 

Ground-Source Heat Pumps (GSHPs) are efficient means of space heating and cooling. However, owing to their high installation costs, their development in societies has not grown as it should. Therefore, it is crucial to have a meticulous design of these systems. The first step in designing GSHPs is determining the ground and grout thermal properties. Thermal Response Tests (TRTs) are developed for this purpose. The previous methods of estimating the unknown thermal properties are either computationally inefficient or yield inaccurate estimates for the ground volumetric heat capacity, to which the mean fluid temperature has the slightest sensitivity among all thermal properties. Among previous... 

The main goal of this thesis is the design and development of a rehabilitation device for helping patients “to improve blood circulation” & retain and recover their abilities if possible that were lost during the stroke or a accident like that (my research in karaj/iran shows that it is possible by just movement of the specific body part). The focus is on hand in this thesis because Injuries to the hand are common and can be very debilitating since our hands are our primary means for interacting with our world. For rehabilitation in case of human hand there are several practices that should be done for patients either in home or in a rehabilitation center, time and money that is supposed to... 

In the past few decades, shaking tables are widely used to evaluate system response of structures under seismic excitations. These devices are used without any fundamental research performed on a shaking table system as an entity model. In most of these studies for simplicity, it is assumed that there exist no considerable vibration and displacement around the shaking tables, and no attention is paid to the peripheral substances such as soil settled under the foundation.
In this thesis, result of ambient vibration test on shaking table system (solid deck, concrete foundation and soil layer) has been presented. Precise sensors known as low frequency and high accuracy accelerometers have... 

Out of several ground improvement techniques available, stone columns have been widely used. This technique has been successfully applied to increase the bearing capacity and to reduce the settlement for foundation of structures like liquid storage tanks, earthen embankments, raft foundations, etc., where a relatively large settlement is permissible. This technique has, generally, been proven successful in increasing the stiffness of weak soils, upgrading their safe bearing capacity, and reducing their total and differential settlements, as well as speeding up their consolidation process. The beneficial effects of stone column installation in weak deposits is manifested in the form of... 

Laminar forced convection flow through a channel partially filled with a porous material was numerically studied in this thesis. The Navier-Stokes and Brinkman-Forchheimer equations were used to model the fluid flow in the free and porous regions, respectively. Coupling of the pressure and velocity fields was resolved using the SIMPLEC algorithm. The local thermal equilibrium was adopted in the energy equation. The effects of the thermal conductivity ratio, Darcy number, porosity, Reynolds number and height of the porous insert on velocity and temperature field were investigated. The results show that the flow behavior and its associated heat transfer are susceptible to the variation of the... 

In the present study, a new version of haptic devices is presented in which user’s hand is in contact with the device just while collision with virtual surface. In this system, the position of user’s finger can be traced by using a camera and the haptic device follows user’s finger at the distance of about two centimeters. While the haptic device approaches to the virtual surface, gradually reduces its speed and stops about two centimeters distant of virtual plane. Then user’s hand collides with the haptic device which is static. Greater fidelity, transparency, more stability and also no need to large actuators are of the advantages of this system. In this project, first we present a new... 

In this thesis we try to find optimized parameters for imaging and manipulation of a biosample with AFM. For this we have prepared a numerous Molecular Dynamics simulation and find some reliable result. So, first we have focused on imaging process in Non contact mode (the less harmful mode). Then we headed into the manipulation process. The main problem about manipulating a biosample is the environment. In imaging section, the process of imaging a biomolecule by AFM is modeled using molecular dynamics simulations. Since the large normal force exerted by the tip on the biosample in contact and tapping modes may damage the sample structure and produce irreversible deformation, the non-contact... 

Results of previous studies on silt and clay indicated that variations in the small strain shear modulus, Gmax, during drying had a non-linear increasing trend with matric suction with greater values upon wetting. However, due to different material properties and inter-particle forces, different behaviour in Gmax is expected for sand. Although considerable research has been devoted in recent years to characterize the behaviour of Gmax of sand during drying, rather less attention has been paid to the effect of hydraulic hysteresis on Gmax and its variations during wetting. In the study presented herein, an effort was made to characterize the variation of Gmax for specimens of sand during... 

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 aim of this thesis is to develop a mathematical model for vibration analysis of cracked rotors. This model should be a simple and precise model for prediction of the cracked rotor vibration behavior and suitable for vibration control. In order to create such model, the pure bending of a cracked beam is analyzed at first. This analysis is performed for two different orientations of the crack with respect to the beam and the bending vector. In this section a continuous bending model with continuous model for crack is developed which can predict the full deformation of the cracked beam in bending and can estimate the stress distribution in the beam with good approximation. Comparison...