Sharif Digital Repository

The major obstacle in using natural gas as a clean and abundant fuel in transportation industries is the low density of energy obtained from its combustion. Adsorbed Natural Gas (ANG) is a useful method to increase the energy density and store the natural gas. The lower cost and higher safety have made it different from the other storage technologies. In addition, ANG can be useful to solve the lack of gas in the peak of consumption. Among all adsorbents, Activated Carbon (AC) has shown the highest adsorption capacity of natural gas. In the present project, walnut shell has been used as the precursor in the chemical synthesise of AC. The main effective factors in chemical activation, such as... 

Catalytic cracking of iso and normal butane over HZSM-5 at several temperatures and a variety of contact time and different partial pressures of hydrocarbon feed was conducted. Experiments indicate that the operating conditions have considerable effects on final product distribution and feed conversion. Results show that high temperatures, low contact time and partial pressure of paraffin feed favor the light olefin production, particularly propylene production. Results obtained for iso-butane show a similar conversion values in comparison to n-butane but a higher olefin and propylene selectivity. Finally kinetic modeling of both iso and normal butane cracking was performed based on a lump... 

Laser ultrasonic is a novel method for measuring sheet parameters. In this technique an intense pulse is irradiated to the target which instantaneously vaporizes the surface layer into the high temperature and high pressure plasma. Expansion of plasma produces shock wave that propagates through the surface. Mechanical properties of target can be calculated by measuring and analyzing produced shock wave. In this project wave propagation is simulated using finite element and numerical-computation methods. The numerical-computation simulation was performed using lamb wave equations. ANSYS software was employed for finite element simulation. The results corroborate each other. Next, simulation... 

Nowadays, autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) are implemented to carry out various activities under water. Amongst applications of these vehicles we can mention monitoring of marine creatures, mine installation and neutralization, and many military applications. The objective of this research is designing a control algorithm for underwater vehicles such that an under actuated vehicle can reckon a moving target as a reference and whilst chasing it, vehicle can keep a fixed distance from this target. First the dynamics of underwater vehicles are modeled and in this modeling different effects due to under water motion such as drag force, buoyancy force, and also added mass are included... 

In this paper, the general research of impedance control is addressed for a robotic manipulator with a moving flexible base. Impedance control imposes a relation between force and displacement at the contact point with the environment. The concept of impedance control of flexible base moving manipulators (FBMM) is rather new and is being considered. The dynamic of manipulator is decomposed into slow and fast dynamics using singular perturbation method. New sliding mode impedance control method (SMIC), using an element on the end effector is proposed for high precision impedance control of FBMM. The sliding mode impedance control method as a robust impedance control law is derived for the... 

The reflective optical rotary encoders are used greatly in automation systems for speed and position measurements. Their approach of reading code as pulses which results in position and speed information is very similar to what a CD-ROM driver performs to read the saved data as pits and lands on the compact disc data layer. Moreover, the micron size of pits and lands in compact disc promise a high-resolution, and low cost rotary encoder based on CD-ROM technology. In this thesis, two concepts of length coding and hybrid incremental-absolute coded discs are proposed. To verify the implementation of these concepts, the rotary encoder set based on CD-ROM technology is designed and tested. It... 

The main objective of this project is to investigate modeling for a robotic swarm with suitable sensors and to analyze effect of sensory noise on the control and unity of the swarm. This project is an extension of analytical study done by S. Etemadi, A. Alasty and G. Vossoughi in Sharif University of technology. The flocking frame assumed to have a leader robot that controls over all behavior of the swarm made of agents’ robots with limited equipments and low intelligence that only obey some basic attraction and repulsion laws that will be explained. As an initial step of the analysis, we investigate proper physical model, sensors and navigation systems suitable to the model. Next, the... 

Modeling and Control are fundamental issues for fish robots, which can play basic roles in design, optimization, fabrication, and eventually utilization of them. A review on the literature reveals the shortage of an analytical closed form model with little simplifications and high precision, and also control works based on such models. Studying LAEBT theory, it is shown that this theory is suitable for determining the forces produced due to the tail movements considered in the present work, and then it is used to determine the forces. Experimental investigations by means of the setup made for this purpose showed that the obtained equations for the forces have got acceptable precision.... 

This research focuses on the robust mobile robot localization exploiting motion information acquired from an optical mouse operating based on optical flow technology. Most techniques of visual motion measurement are based on the well research discipline called “optical flow”. Theoretically, optical flow as a method of localization can be highly accurate, but it is sensitive to the noise and surface texture/optical characteristics and distance variations between the CCD detector and surface. As one could not achieve acceptable results in practical situations, to handle these problems, we propose to attach an acceleration – gyro (INS) sensor on the CCD detector (optical mouse) to improve the... 

Robot navigation and guidance is an important issue in robotic. Navigation by itself includes localization, path planning and guidance. For having a successful navigation it is necessary to succeed in all of those parts. The localization precision as basic part of localization is important and having more accurate information of robot position is important. Recently, sensors which use optical flow technic and are widely used in optical mouses are so common and they are able to measure displacement with resolution of 3 to 63 micron. In this research, a localization method for micro robot localization based on optical flow and INS sensor data fusion is presented.
Two data fusion method... 

• Brachiation robot is a kind of under-actuated robots. A brachiating robot is a type of a mobile arm that is capable of moving from branch to branch similar to a long-armed ape. The purpose of this thesis is control of a two link Brachiation robot. The purpose of this thesis is control of a two link Brachiation robot using neural network and geometry control. For this purpose a genetic algorithm based training Neural Network is used to produce a suitable path for the second link of the robot and then using input-output linearization method, the second link is controlled to follow the path. The simulations shows that the Nero Controller designed in this thesis is suitable. The controller can... 

Microrobots are generally suitable for implementation of certain works in miniature dimensions such as micro assembly, microsurgery, adaption with small animals and so on. In this way, there is special position for mobile microrobots capable of moving in the range of more than theirs dimensions. Achivieng to high resolution and high speed locomotion are the challenging issues in the microrobot’s development in which much effort has been done.The goal of this project is dynamic modeling and velocity control of an A-shaped microrobot with with nanometric locomotion. During this project, first the dynamic modeling of microrobot is investigated and simplified based on the previous studies.... 

The present study deals with designing controller for Therapeutic Exercise Robots which belongs to larger group namely Rehabilitation robots. Therapeutic exercise robots are often realized in shape of exoskeleton robots. The main line of present research is involved with, designing controller for lower limb therapeutic exercise robots and offering and implementing technical rehabilitation ideas. Firstly, in order to have a reliable position-control, considering practical limitations (e.g. system uncertainties), a robust adaptive control has been designed. Adaptive control can deals with parameters uncertainties and covering unstructured uncertainties (e.g. disturbance and noise) can be... 

Nowadays exoskeltons are developed because of improvements carried out in mechatronic technologies, to use in applications such as human rehabilitation and power augmentation. By reason of interaction between exoskeleton robot and human, an appropriate control strategy should be considered to implement regulated interaction force between them. As an example there are situations that a person wants to carry heavy load with this robot without suffering from weight of the load, so control of robot movements is of great importance. The aim of this thesis is dedicated to develop and implement a control strategy achieving minimum ineraction force in a 2 degree of freedom lower limb exoskeleton.... 

Nowadays filtration process is increasingly used in various areas such as water purification, food industries, filtering the air dust and other separation applications. In this work, the HDPE microporous filters have been fabricated at different temperature, pressure and time conditions via sintering process and then were characterized by different techniques. It can be expected that microstructure and mechanical properties of the samples could be controlled by changing the fabrication parameters of the process and also by changing the properties of the resin such as powder shape, particle size and rheological properties. In the first step, by using DSC, MFI, rheology test and optical... 

In this project, the final goal is to create a team consisting of a UGV and a quadrotor capable of relative tracking and coordinated landing, with focus on quadrotor control. What we mean by cooperative control in this project is control of quadrotor for the purpose of cooperation with a UGV; This should not be mistaken with another sense of cooperative control in which the control algorithms are developed for both of the robots or are based on the interactive dynamics of the robots.In order to accomplish this goal, an experimental testbed consisting of a quadrotor and a UGV capable of communication and data exchange was developed as a first step. The quadrotor was constructed using... 

Polyethylene is one of the most widely used industrial materials for producing water and gas pipes due to low pricing and mechanical properties and high corrosion resistance. Various parameters such as molecular weight and the short chain branches distribution strongly affect the mechanical properties of these materials. PE100 grade of this material has been introduced with bimodal molecular weight distribution, has excellent mechanical properties and especially high creep resistance and today is used for pipe production in water distribution systems. In the first part of this study, the effect of 1-butene comonomers on different properties of three PE100 and two PE80 resins produced in...