Sharif Digital Repository

Considering the drastical increase of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, especially carbon dioxide, reduction of these gases seems necessary to combat global warming. Fossil fuel power plants are one of the main sources of CO2 emission. In this paper, CO2 capture from a natural gas fired steam cycle power plant using oxy-fuel combustion technology is studied. The Integrated Environmental Control Model (IECM) developed by Carnegie Mellon University was used to evaluate the effect of this capture technology on the plant efficiency and economic parameters of the system. Since the oxygen production plant, CO2 capture and transport are cost and energy intensive, the cost of electricity generated... 

Collapsible soils are kinds of problematic soils which are susceptible to large and sudden reduction in volume upon wetting. A manifest kind of these soils is loess; catastrophic settlement of structures which are built upon it has been observed when the soil becomes wet. In this investigation the collapse potential of samples of loess taken from Gorgan, Golestan, Iran, has been studied by using unsaturated odometer tests under controlled matric suction. To this end, two modified odometer apparatus with the capability of controlling the matric suction, have been designed and developed. Undisturbed samples of soil have been tested under K0 condition, while the matric suction, volumetric... 

Due to the increasing influence of distribution generation , their effect in planning can't be ignord , especially solar panels ,which are incresing rapidly. The main purpose of this thesis is to an active distribution network that annually load bus and the amount of photovoltaic production in it increases and plan dynamically. In the planning that is done , uncertanty in the amount comsumption load and uncertanty in the pattern of sunlight and also annual innterest rates in the classical system we have planned by optimizing the network expansion costs , in addition to supplying the load bus, we can keep the voltage drop bus and line filling within the allowable . To do this , we considered... 

Determination of the elastic fields associated with a spherical multiply-coated inhomogeneous inclusion is a problem of great interest among researchers. In this work a set consisting of N+1 concentric spherical domains is considered. Each domain is either isotropic or spherically isotropic and is functionally graded (FG) in the radial direction. The outermost spherical surface is subjected to nonuniform loading and the constituent phases are subjected to some prescribed nonuniform body force and eigenstrain fields. When the outermost domain is an unbounded medium with zero eigenstrain and body force fields then an N-phase multi-inhomogeneous inclusion problem is realized for which the... 

Millions of people are exposed to noise every day in their work and life, and their physical and mental health is at risk due to this issue. Hence, the issue of noise and vibration has become an important factor in car quality. One of the sources of noise and vibration in the vehicle is the engine. The engine is the heart of the car and its most important part. Therefore, reducing Engine noise can have a significant effect on the noise emitted by the vehicle. Engine noise can be divided into three categories: 1 - combustion noise 2 - mechanical noise 3 - aerodynamic noise. This project is in line with a project defined between the university and industry aimed at improving all sources of... 

NiTi Memory alloys have a great range of applications. Porous metallic biomaterials (e.g., stainless steel, chromium- cobalt, titanium and nickel–titanium (NiTi)) represent superior alternatives to traditional non-porous metallic implants for two main reasons. First, open porosity can enhance bone ingrowth and thus improve fixation at the interface between bone and implant. Second, porosity decreases the mismatch in stiffness between bone and implant, thus reducing stress-shielding effects which shorten the lifetime of the implant through bone resorption and loosening. NiTi foams may thus find multi-functional applications such as bone implants, impedance-matching connectors between... 

Experiments conducted in recent two decades indicated critical behavior in neural activity at different scales. Theoretically occurrences of these critical and power-law behavior can significantly facilitate brain activities correspondent to computation and memory tasks, but attaining the critical point essentially demands externally fine-tuning which has not been established yet. This fine-tuning often lies with placing system at transition point. Recent studies of group showed that a transition from synchronous to asynchronous phase could be achievable by a change in external parameters. At the very transition point, neuronal avalanches statistically demonstrate a power-law behavior which... 

Air-cooled condenser is widely used in thermal power plants as its main cooling system. However, the thermal capacity of air-cooled condensers reduces considerably in environmental wind drafts. So, the purpose of this study is to find practicable solutions to minimize the mal-performance of air-cooled condensers in windy conditions in either design or off-design conditions and consequently prevent the related steam turbines power reduction. The target combined cycle power plant consists of 4*160 MW steam turbines and 4 air-cooled condensers in its steam cycle part. This research presents two general and practical remedies, which are also applicable to many different powerplants irrespective... 

Despite the increase in the number of cardiovascular diseases worldwide, the number of new drugs to treat these diseases has been decreasing in the last decade. Current preclinical drug evaluation strategies, which use cell cultures and oversimplified animal models, cannot meet the growing demand for new and effective drugs. In the last decade, the development of microfluidic bioreactors and organ-on-chip systems to improve the drug screening process has been increasing significantly. These systems have shown many advantages over previous preclinical models. Despite all these advantages, keeping the oxygen concentration at the optimal physiological level in microfluidic systems has its own... 

A complte set of characteristic parameters of the sandpile models is still unknown. We have studied the existence of ”weak chaos” critical exponent in different sandpile models and we have shown that it is a characteristic exponent of deterministic models. We have shown that BTW and Zhang models do not belong to the same universality class (contrary to Zhang’s previous conjecture and contrary to Ben-Hur & Biham’s results.) Also we have shown that directed models, specificly Ramaswamy-Dhar’s directed model form a different universality class. ”Weak chaos” exponent in also studied in massive models and we have shown that by increase of dissipation, the exponent decreases rapidly to an... 

We study the Abelian Sandpile Model and its relation with surface growth. ese two models are related through their field theories and equations of motion. It has been shown that the different features of different sandpile models can be expressed in terms of the noise term in the surface growth equation. A mapping between the simplest sandpile model, the BTW model, and a surface growth has already been introduced. is surface growth has not been studied in details so far. In this thesis we study different features of this surface growth corresponding to the BTW model, continuous sandpile model and also massive abelian sandpile model. We also consider different boundary conditions  

The four-page article by Bak, Tang and Wiesenfeld in 1987 was a beginning to a new wave of physicists’ efforts to explain and describe the concept of complexity; a not-so-well-defined concept that resists against the reductionist tools and methods of physics. The Self-organized Criticality theory presented in that article via a simple model, known as sandpile model, was first of all an effort to explain the numerous occurrence of power law distribution in nature. SOC was introduced to tell us why so many natural phenomena like Earthquakes, landslides, forest fires, extinction and other seemingly non-related catastrophic events, more or less obey the scale-less power law distribution; A... 

In this research, we want to address the question of universality classes in BTW and Manna sandpile models. So far, number of works has been devoted to this issue but the the answer remained unsolved. We will try another approach to study this question by perturbing the original models. To this end, we introduce three models that have evolution rules between BTW model and Manna model. By simulating this models, we observe that in the presence of perturbation, the probability dis- tribution has two regimes of behaviour which are separated by a new characteristic scale. The regime of small avalanches is described by the exponent of BTW model and the regime of large avalanches by the exponent... 

Edwards-Wilkinson’s equation can be achieved from a Hamiltonian. When we have the Hamiltonian for the system, there are common approaches that makes it out of critical. In other words,the ”mass” should be added to the system. In this study we have tried to simulate and solve analytically these models that are involved mass term. We try to onstruct these mass terms in a way that have a minimum impact on the system and we study the quantities that characterize the out of critical behaviors  

Percolation is a phenomenon that can be found in many physical problems. Additionally, as a statistical model, it has a very rich physics, since many fundamental concepts in the context of critical phenomena and complex systems-such as phase transition, scaling laws etc can be found in the model. Percolation phenomenon can be defined on different lattices. In this thesis we study percolation on small-world networks. In small-world networks, in addition to local bonds that connects the neighbouring sites, there exist some long-ranged bonds that connect cites far from each other. Social networks, some networks of internet or the gene networks are examples of such networks. Therefore, to study... 

Self-organized critical phenomena are interesting phenomena which are ubiquitous in nature. Examples include mountain ranges , coastlines and also activities in the hu-man's brain. In these processes, without fine-tuning of any external parameter such as the temperature, the system exhibits critical behavior. In other words, the dynamics of the system, drives it towards an state in which long range correlations in space and scaling behaviors can be seen.The first successful model which could characterize such systems was BTW model, introduced by Bak , Tang and Wiesenfeld in 1987. This model, later named Abelian sandpile model, was very simple and because of this simplicity, a large amount of... 

Since the concept of Self-Organized Criticality was introduced in terms of BTW Sandpiles model, its major features have been known as broad power law distributions without any tuning parameters. In some selforganized critical systems like brain and neural networks, some evidences and experiments show a periodic or non-power law distribution of avalanches in addition to the power-law distributions of avalanches. In this thesis we try to observe the same phenomenon in the well-known SOC models, namely the BTW and Manna sandpile models. We have considered small lattice sizes with periodic boundary conditions and a small amount of dissipation. Within such conditions we observe a periodic-like... 

Power law behavior of earthquakes has been a matter of interest for many scientists. One on these power laws known as Gutenberg-Richter law describes the magnitude distribution of earthquakes. The Burridge-Knopoff model of faults, produces the same power law distribution of events as the Gutenberg-Richter law for earthquakes. Olami, Feder and Christensen in 1992, introduced a 2-D, continues sand pile model Known as OFC that displays self-organized-criticality. They claimed that this model is equivalent to Burridge-Knopoff model. It means that criticality is the origin of power law behavior of the Burridge-Knopoff model. Nevertheless, there are some evidence against criticality in the...