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... 

Since the classical continuum theory fails to deal with the problems associated with defects, stress concentrators, and relevant deformation phenomena in solids, alternative approaches that can detect the atomistic nature of materials' fracture are required. The deficiency of the capture the size effect which yields delusively high values for some components of the stress field right on the edge of the stress concentrators, and its weakness in describing the complex interaction between small inhomogeneities, cracks and the like when they are only a few nanometers apart, are among some of the disadvantages of the classical approach. In recent years, however, atomistic methods are emerging to... 

Aluminum Bronzes have many applications in marine environments. These alloys suffer from both hot cracking and cold cracking. In order to overcome the hot cracking and cold cracking, Semisolid Stir Joining method and a proper thermal cycle was used respectively. Effects of temperature, stirring rate, and tool type were investigated in Semisolid Stir joining method. In this method, butt joint design was used in order to place specimens, and the specimens were heated up to specific temperatures (920, 925, 930°C). A stirrer (Cylindrical and Grooved tool) with three rotational speeds (800, 1200, 1600 RPM) was introduced into the stir weld seam. Welded specimens were cooled to the 900°C... 

The low female labor force participation rate in the Iranian labor market relative to the global average and even to countries that do not differ significantly from the socio-economic characteristics of our country is one of the important questions of the Iranian labor market. In this study, we seek to answer the question of whether the economic participation rate of married women will increase if the gender gaps in wages, job findings and job losses among women and men are eliminated in the Iranian labor market. To answer this question using household expenditure and income data and labor force data, we show that between the two categories of occupations, in terms of the share of women's... 

Shot peening is a cold-working process commonly used in industry to improve the fatigue performance, stress corrosion resistance and surface nano-crystallization of metallic parts. This process extends fatigue life via two mechanisms: Preventing the crack growth due to compressive residual stresses and, preventing the crack initiation because of increased material hardness. These mechanisms are the results of the bombardment of the component's surface with small spherical particles. In this research, an analytical model is developed for estimating the residual stress distribution induced by shot peening process. The modifications of the developed analytical model are related to... 

Solid-State Drives (SSDs) provide high performance, low power consumption, and hence are widely used in the I/O cache of enterprise storage systems and high performance servers. Although employing high performance SSDs in the I/O cache of storage systems significantly improves system performance, it comes with significant reliability threats for write operations upon power failures. In order to provide high level of reliability, storage architectures employ SSDs in I/O cache with RAID-1 configuration, however, such configuration only partially mitigates the reliability issues of the SSDs. In this thesis, we analyze the reliability of SSD-based I/O caches against power outage and high... 

An optimal trajectory for flight through Microburst wind shears is designed which minimizes the maximum deviation from desired trajectory With respect to optimal control methods. The suitable performance of airplane retrieval in abort landing and landing phases at microburst encounter is achieved by influence of mentioned design in worse case of wind fluctuation and variation. 3D Vicroy microburst model is selected to investigate its effects on 6 DOF jet engine aircraft EOMs. Above optimal control problem is solved using gradient method of SD . Furthermore, sensitivity of optimal trajectory to lateral and longitudinal location of microburst, microburst parameters, throttle setting and... 

Network design problem (NDP) is an important problem in transportation planning, in which transit network design is one the most important problems. Public transportation means, however, can not meet urban mobility needs in the developing countries satisfactorily. Bus services are usually unsuitable, insufficient, and unreliable. Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) system, is an emerging public transport alternative designed to provide appropriate, low cost, and effective services, and improve mobility in both developed and developing countries. To design public transportation systems, existing constraints such as resources and budget have to be considered to serve estimated demand properly. Bus Rapid... 

Power Quality can be simply defined as the quality of voltage at electrical loads. Detection and classification of voltage and current disturbances is of high importance in power system protection and monitoring. This procedure cannot be implemented by operators because of the high volume of the data which must be processed. So, it is needed to automate this procedure. Systems designed for this purpose usually contain three main parts: feature generation, feature selection and classifier design. The algorithms used for feature generation for power quality disturbances are mainly based on discrete Fourier transformation or discrete wavelet transformation. These approaches have shown some...