Sharif Digital Repository

In this paper, a new radiation model for a single-slope solar still has been developed which for the first time takes into account the effect of all walls of the still on the amount of incident solar radiation on the water surface and each wall. In this model, the walls are projected on the cover to calculate the amount of beam radiation received by any components inside the still. This is in contrary to the previous models in which stills' walls were projected on a horizontal surface and their shadows on the water surface and the walls were either neglected or not computed properly. The predictions of the proposed model are compared with the experimental data obtained in the present work... 

In this work, the effect of the number of stages on the productivity of a multi-effect active solar still was experimentally investigated for the first time. Moreover, system performances in continuous and non-continuous modes were compared. For this purpose, indoor experiments were conducted on 4 similar solar still devices with different stages (1-4 stages) in order to accurately control the environmental conditions. In addition, water production was hourly measured during the whole 24-h experiment. The results show that with increased number of stages, distillate production can be predicted with a quadratic function. Moreover, adding a maximum of 6 and 10 additional stages can... 

Solar collecting area is one of the most important operating parameters of active solar stills. No experimental work has been performed to investigate the effect of this parameter to date. Furthermore in all of previous theoretical studies the effect of solar collecting area was examined during only the first 24-hour period of the operation of stills with one specified brine depth. However the present work experimentally studies the long-term simultaneous effects of collector area and brine depth on the performance of active solar stills. For this purpose four parallel active solar stills with different collector areas were fabricated and experiments were conducted for 5 consecutive days... 

In the present work, effects of height, length, and width of a single-slope basin-type solar still on its distillate production was investigated. For this purpose, a radiation model was developed which accounts for the influences of all walls on quantities of received solar radiation by the base and saline water of the still. Moreover, in this radiation model, the side walls of the still were considered as the trapezoid and the diffuse as well as beam components of solar irradiance were separately taken into account for the first time. Abilities of the present model were compared with earlier ones. Furthermore, the predictions of the current model were compared with the present experimental... 

One of the most important operating parameters which affects the performance and efficiency of active solar stills is brine depth. In all of the previous experimental or theoretical studies, effects of water depth were investigated during only the first 24-hour period (or even shorter periods) of the operation of active solar stills. In other words, only the first day was taken into account. However, the production of an active solar still depends on several parameters such as brine temperature at sunrise (initial temperature), which are all affected by the depth variation after the first day of operation. However, the present research experimentally investigates the long-term effects of... 

In this work, the individual and interaction effects of three key operating parameters of the photocatalytic disinfection process were evaluated and optimized using response surface methodology (RSM) for the first time. The chosen operating parameters were: reaction temperature, initial pH of the reaction mixture and TiO2 P-25 photocatalyst loading. Escherichia coli concentration, after 90 minutes irradiation of UV-A light, was selected as the response. Twenty sets of photocatalytic disinfection experiments were conducted by adjusting operating parameters at five levels using the central composite design. Based on the experimental data, a semi-empirical expression was established and applied... 

The present work investigated the outdoor performance of a basin type multi-stage solar still as well as the effect of collector over basin area (CBA) ratio on the distillate production. The effect of CBA was studied in outdoor experiments for the first time. The system consisted of a still coupled with one, two or three flat-plate solar collectors. In order to study the effect of CBA more accurately, the experiments were conducted in both winter and summer. In these experiments, the distilled water production of the multi-stage still was measured during the whole 24. h of a day on an hourly basis. The results revealed that in the winter, the basin coupled to one solar collector (CBA. =... 

Effects of the amount and mode of input energy to an active multi-stage solar still were investigated in this work. To control the input energy, an electrical heater controlled by a PLC was utilized to simulate the energy absorbed by solar collectors. The study of the amount of input energy indicated that the freshwater production was a quadratic function of the collector over basin area (CBA) ratio. It was also found that stages 1 to 4 produced about 36%, 26%, 20% and 18% of the overall yield, respectively. Moreover, the effect of employing a thermal energy storage (TES) on the system performance was studied by comparing the mode of feeding energy according to the daily solar radiation... 

A new and fast method for the preparation of aminals is reported from the reaction of aromatic aldehydes and secondary amines in the presence of potassium carbonate in high yields. The aminal can be converted to the corresponding iminum salt in reaction with acetyl chloride very easily and in very short time with high yield. Addition of trialkylphosphite, as one possible nucleophile, to the prepared iminium salt produces the α-amino phosphonate in very high yield  

Enforcing dynamic and confidential access control policies is a challenging issue of data outsourcing to external servers due to the lack of trust towards the servers. In this paper, we propose a scalable yet flexible access control enforcement mechanism when the underlying relational data, on which access policies are defined, has been shared through a secret sharing scheme. For sharing values of an attribute in a relation, the attribute is assigned a secret distribution key and its values are split and distributed among data servers according to a Shamir based secret sharing scheme. Given access control policies over attributes of the relation schema, access to distribution keys, used... 

Enforcing dynamic and confidential access control policies is a challenging issue of data outsourcing to external servers due to the lack of trust towards the servers. In this paper, we propose a scalable yet flexible access control enforcement mechanism when the underlying relational data, on which access policies are defined, has been shared through a secret sharing scheme. For sharing values of an attribute in a relation, the attribute is assigned a secret distribution key and its values are split and distributed among data servers according to a Shamir based secret sharing scheme. Given access control policies over attributes of the relation schema, access to distribution keys, used... 

The Cúk converter operating in discontinuous capacitor voltage mode (DCVM) inherently benefits from PFC features as unity power factor can be achieved by using a constant duty cycle and switching frequency. In this paper, the switch network modeling technique is applied to the Cúk converter operating in DCVM in order to develop its small-signal model under the assumption that it is fed by a dc voltage source. Afterwards, the model is extended to derive the small-signal behavior of the converter while operating as a PFC converter. The validity of the proposed model is confirmed by both simulation and experimental results  

High speed planing hulls have complex hydrodynamic behaviors. The trim angle and drafts are very sensitive to speed and location of the center of gravity. Therefore, motion simulation for such vessels needs a strong coupling between rigid body motions and hydrodynamic analysis. In addition, free surface should be predicted with good accuracy for each time step. In this paper, velocity and pressure fields are coupled by use of the fractional step method. On the basis of integration of the two-phase viscous flow induced stresses over the hull, acting loads (forces and moments) are calculated. With the strategy of boundary-fitted body-attached mesh and calculation of 6-DoF motions in each time... 

Both the equation of state-excess Gibbs energy (EoS/GE) model and the cubic plus association (CPA) equation of state (EoS) are compared in this study with respect to their accuracy in the correlation of PVTx for systems such as water/methanol, water/ethanol, water/benzene, water/toluene, water/methane, water/n-butane, water/n-pentane, water/n-hexane, water/heptane, and water/octane, in supercritical conditions within temperature and pressure ranges of (573-698 K) and (7. 0-276. 0 MPa), respectively. In the proposed EoS/GE model, Peng-Robinson (PR) equation of state, linear combination Vidal-Michelsen (LCVM) and Wong-Sandler (WS) mixing rules in conjunction with UNIQUAC activity coefficient... 

Radial forging is an open forging process used for reducing the diameters of shafts, tubes, stepped shafts and axels, as well as for creating internal profiles for tubes such as rifling the gun barrels. The radial forging of tubes is usually performed over a mandrel to create an internal profile and/or size the internal diameter; but the process can also be used without a mandrel when workpiece geometry does not allow it or the internal surface quality is not critical. In some industrial applications, it may not be possible to use a mandrel inside the tubular workpiece, e.g., due to geometrical limitations of the workpiece. In this study, finite element modelling is applied to model the... 

Radial forging is an open forging process used for reducing the diameters of shafts, tubes, stepped shafts and axels, and creating internal profiles for tubes such as rifling of gun barrels. Usually a mandrel is used inside a tubular workpiece to create internal profile and/or size the internal diameter, but the process can also be performed without a mandrel when workpiece geometry does not allow utilizing it or the internal surface quality is not critical. Moreover, in stepped shafts and tubes, often there is a fillet connecting two different sections. If it is possible to produce that fillet during the forging process, the process could be more cost effective. So, in this paper, four... 

Passivity-based control (PBC) is based on a procedure including energy/power shaping and series/parallel damping injection to control several nonlinear systems such as power converters. In this paper, PBC is used to design a controller for three phase/level/switch PWM (Vienna I) rectifier. Passivity-based controller is supposed to regulate the output voltage and the input three phase sinusoidal currents to achieve unity power factor. Parallel damping injection is used for a controller design. Simulation results are presented to confirm the whole system performance and verify the analytical conclusions. It is also shown that the controller is robust to the load and (symmetrical) input... 

This paper presents a decentralized adaptive control design for a class of large-scale nonlinear systems with unknown subsystems. When the subsystems are modeled by affine equations, a direct adaptive controller is devised based on the Lyapunov theory, so that the stability of the closed-loop system is guaranteed by introducing a suitably driven adaptive rule. A neuro-based structure is proposed when the subsystems are nonaffine, and the stability analysis is also performed based on the Lyapunov theory. Moreover, the unknown interactions among the subsystems are considered as having a nonlinear function against the simple form considered for the affine case. The proposed controllers are... 

Rapid and selective detection of biomarkers at trace levels is a highly coveted objective in the early diagnosis of cancer. Herein, we disclose the design and synthesis of a polyhedral oligomeric silsesquioxane (POSS) substituted perylene diimide. This compound is fully characterized in solution by multi nuclear NMR, as well as in gas state by ESI-MS. Surprisingly, solid-state characterization revealed an unusual cubic morphology with particle dimensions of 80–160 nm. Fluorescence studies indicate that the bulky POSS units effectively prevent perylene's aggregation caused quenching, yielding quantum yields as high as 92%. Exposing the sensor droplet-cast on quartz to anline and o-toluidine,...