Sharif Digital Repository

In this study, the effect of nano-structure mesoporous supports on the performance of the nickel catalysts in the combined reforming process was investigated. In the first part, magnesium aluminate spinel was prepared using a sol-gel method and employed as a catalyst support for the preparation of nickel catalysts with various nickel contents. The samples were characterized using BET, XRD, TPR, TPO, CO chemisorption and SEM techniques. The results showed that increasing the nickel content up to 7.5 wt.% improved the catalytic activity, but further increase in nickel content decreased the activity due to the decrease in the nickel dispersion. The catalysts except of the sample with 2.5 wt.%... 

Some of the thermal power plants use heavy fuel oil as an auxiliary fuel instead of the fuel gas, especially in the cold seasons. In these plants, in order to reduce fuel viscosity, heavy fuel oil is heated in several stages including fuel storage tank, connection lines and oil supply to burner by heat exchange with returned steam from the turbine, which can lead to fuel leakage into the condensates. This contamination is in addition to the contamination that has resulted from leaking seals on steam driven equipments, such as pumps and turbines. Reusing these contaminated condensates as boiler feed water can lead to coking of hydrocarbons and deposition of a hard scale on boiler tube walls.... 

In the proton exchange membrane fuel cells (PEM, the produced water would be divided into two phases of vapor and liquid. distribution of both liquid and vapor phases in different cell layers affects the performance, the efficiency and the life of a fuel cell significantly. Moreover, Nano pores of the cathode catalyst layer are involved with some phenomena such as electrochemical reaction kinetics, heat and mass transfer and interface phase change. One of the most important problems in the performance of fuel cells is distribution of liquid water in the porous areas. Water flooding in fuel cells causes to delay in oxygen transport to active sites in the catalyst layer because the pores of... 

The propagation behavior of Love wave in functionally graded magneto-electro-elastic half-spaces with a quadratic variation is addressed. The magneto-electromechanical coupling factor, the dispersion relations, electric potential, magnetic potential and displacement are obtained analytically for both magneto-electrically open and short conditions. The effect of gradient coefficient on phase velocity, group velocity and magneto-electromechanical coupling factor are plotted and discussed. Research on the wave propagation in magneto-electro-elastic materials is still very limited. This work provides us with a theoretical foundation to design and practically apply SAW devices with high... 

In this study, the interaction between thin plate completely bonded to the transversely isotropic halfspace and a concentrated force applied horizontally (Mindlin-type force) are considered. This problem has been solved analytically. This problem is used as sample for thin solid films and surface coating technology, where the surface of solid is covered by thethin plate for increasing its stiffness. Moreover, this problem is a good sample when homogenous solid is subjected to contact loading and can be seen that mechanical properties of material which is near the solid surface varies; consequently, a two-phase solid is created.Because of the influence of noted inhomogeneity, solid is... 

Hydrodynamics plays a crucial role in defining the performance of fluidized beds. The numerical simulation of fluidized bed is very important in the prediction of its behaviour. From this point of view, in the present study a dynamic two dimensioanl model is developed for the modeling of regenerator system of a UOP fluid catalytic cracking (FCC) unit of Abadan refinery with a high-efficiency regenerator. Of the various modeling and simulation techniques, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) is employed in this thesis. Effects of gas velocity, the transient local solid volume fraction, pressure drop for gas and solid phase, solid holdup distribution and solid circulation pattern have been... 

Privacy preserving data mining helps organizations and companies not only to deal with privacy concerns of customers and regular limitations, but also to benefit from collaborative data mining. Utilizing cryptographic techniques and secure multiparty computation (SMC) are among widely employed approaches for preserving privacy in distributed data mining. The general purpose of secure multiparty computation protocols to compute specific functions on private inputs of parties in a collaborative manner and without revealing their private inputs. Providing rigorous security proof of secure multiparty computation makes it a good choice for privacy preservation, despite of its cryptographic... 

The rapid growth of Android operating system alongside its open-source nature has made it as the most popular operating system of mobile devices. On the other hand, regarding the increasing computational power of mobile devices, a wide variety of applications are coming to this type of devices. Meanwhile unfortunately many malicious softwares trying to keep up with other applications, are targeting this popular operating system. Therefore with regard to the fact that this type of devices usually store private and sensitive information of their users, security of mobile operating systems is considered very important. Having this matter in mind, the goal of this research work has been... 

In this study, a new concrete slab stiffened by concrete pedestals and steel cables is introduced. The slab system is studied by employing both analytical and numerical methods. The steel cables are connected to the edges of slab and the concrete pedestals mounted at the bottom face of slab act as the middle supports of cables. The tension force in the cable and its inclination results in upward forces acting at the bottom face of slab. With the aims of classical theory of thin plates and the superposition technique, the problem of a simply supported rectangular slab stiffened by cables is studied analytically. The obtained results are verified by a numerical modelling implemented in SAP2000... 

The parametric study of a new introduced metallic yielding damper called telescopic damper is addressed. The telescopic damper comprises of three concentric steel pipes connected together by lead shear keys. The inner and outer steel pipes are subjected to axial loading which results in the shear yielding of the embedded lead cylinders. The inner steel pipe has a lock which limits its movement to some certain extent and beyond this limit the outer tube activates. Employing ABAQUS software, the behavior of damper under cyclic loading is studied numerically. The finite element model is verified by available results in the literature. The effects of inner and outer steel pipes thickness,... 

An important class of applications which have been rapidly growing recently is the one that create and use time series data. These types of data sets are ordered based on the timestamps associated to their data items. In practice, traditional relational databases are unable to satisfy the requirements of these data sets; however, NoSQL databases with column-wide data structure are appropriate infrastructure for them. These databases are very efficient in read and write operations (especially for time series data, which are ordered) and are able to store unstructured data. Time series data may contain valuable and sensitive information; hence, they should be protected from the information... 

Nowadays large volume of sensitive data of organizations are stored in the databases. Thus, databases are attractive to the attackers to execute different types of attacks with different purposes. The useful information that attackers try to achieve in the preliminary steps of the attacks against the databases, is the database structure or schema. One of the popular approach to extract the schema of a database is to analyze the returned error messages from its DBMS. Hence, a solution to prevent schema disclosure via the error messages is customizing and modifying them. To achieve this goal, in this thesis, we propose a framework to handle and customize the error messages automatically and... 

In this study, a new type of metallic yielding damper called Telescopic damper is proposed and analyzed numerically. The damper comprises of three concentric steel tubes connected together by lead shear keys. The relative axial deformation of steel tubes under axial forces results in shear deformation and yielding in lead shear keys and dissipates energy. The inner steel tube has a lock which limits its movement to some certain extent and beyond this limit the outer tube activates. Therefore, a multi-linear force-deformation behavior with two different yield plateaus is expected for the introduced telescopic damper. The multi-level yield plateaus of damper makes it effective in both low and...