Sharif Digital Repository

Distributed generation (DG) units are increasingly installed in the power systems. Distribution companies (DisCo) can opt to purchase the electricity from DG in an energy purchase contract to supply the customer demand and reduce energy loss. This paper proposes a framework for optimal contract pricing of independent dispatchable DG units considering competition among them. While DG units tend to increase their profit from the energy purchase contract, DisCo minimizes the demand supply cost. Multi-leader follower game theory concept is used to analyze the situation in which competing DG units offer the energy price to DisCo and DisCo determines the DG generation. A bi-level approach is used... 

The reliability Studies are done in order to determine the probability of functioning or availability of different engineering systems. These studies can also provide a basis for comparing different structures of a system and can be used as a tool to improve the system design. Also, reliability is an important consideration in the planning, design and operation of transit system. Since the issue of the reliability of electric vehicles has not been sufficiently and seriously evaluated yet, so in this paper, the reliability of the various types of these kinds of vehicles will be discussed and then the reliability indices of them will be compared with each other and with the conventional cars  

This paper presents a new approach based on multi leader follower game in order to find the optimal contract price of distributed generation in distribution network considering competition among them. The leader problems correspond to the independent DG units who decide to maximize the individual profits, while the follower problem refers to the distribution company (DisCo) which seeks the minimization of the payments incurred in attending the expected demand while satisfying network constraints. Disco can purchase energy either from the transmission network through the substations or from the DG units within its network. The DisCo minimization problem acts as a constraint into the each DG... 

In this paper, the time-varying auto regressive moving average (ARMA) process is used as a simple yet efficient method for simulating earthquake ground motions. This model is capable of reproducing the nonstationary amplitude as well as the frequency content of the earthquake ground accelerations. The moving time-window technique is used to estimate the time variation of the model parameters from the actual earthquake records. The method is applied to synthesize the near field earthquakes, Naghan 1977, Tabas 1978, and Manjil 1990 recorded on dense soils in Iran, as well as the Mexico City 1985 earthquake recorded on a site with soft soil. It is shown that the selected ARMA (2,1) model and... 

Several lattice Boltzmann models for multi-phase flow have been developed, but few of them are capable of modeling fluid flows with high density ratio in the order of 1000. Therefore, an advanced chromodynamics, Rothmann-Keller (RK) type model is employed in current study, which can handle liquid-gas density ratio in the order of 1000 and viscosity ratio in the order of 100. Other distinctive characteristics of the proposed model are high stability, and capability of setting parameters such as surface tension independently. In spite of these benefits, the original RK model fails to model wetting tendency of the fluids. As a result, it is impossible to correctly simulate two-fluid phase flow... 

Semi-analytical solutions are obtained for the electrical potential, electroosmotic velocity, ionic conductance, and surface physicochemical properties associated with long pH-regulated nanochannels of arbitrary but constant cross-sectional area. The effects of electric double layer overlap, multiple ionic species, and surface association/dissociation reactions are all taken into account, assuming low surface potentials. The method of analysis includes series solutions which the pertinent coefficients are obtained by applying the wall boundary conditions using either of the least-squares or point matching techniques. Although the procedure is general enough to be applied to almost any... 

The dispersion of a neutral solute band by electrokinetic flow in polyelectrolyte layer (PEL)-grafted rectangular/slit microchannels is theoretically studied. The flow is assumed to be both steady and fully developed and a first-order irreversible reaction is considered at the wall to account for probable surface adsorption of solutes. Considering low electric potentials, analytical solutions are obtained for electric potential, fluid velocity and solute concentration. Special solutions are also obtained for the case without wall adsorption. To track the dispersion properties of the solute band, the generalized dispersion model is adopted by considering the exchange, the convection and the... 

Infinite series solutions are obtained for electrical potential, electroosmotic velocity, ionic conductance, and surface physicochemical properties of long pH-regulated rectangular nanochannels of low surface potential utilizing the double finite Fourier transform method. Closed form expressions are also obtained for channels of large height to width ratio for which the depthwise variations vanish. Neglecting the Stern layer impact, the effects of EDL (Electric Double Layer) overlap, multiple ionic species, and association/dissociation reactions on the surface are all taken into account. Moreover, finite-element-based numerical simulations are conducted to account for the end effects as well... 

The polysaccharide, kappa-carrageenan (κC) was chemically modified to achieve a novel superabsorbent hydrogel via graft copolymerization of methacrylamide (MAM) onto the substrate followed by alkaline hydrolysis. Ammonium persulfate (APS) and N,N′-methylene bisacrylamide (MBA) were used as a free-radical initiator and a crosslinker, respectively. The saponification reaction was carried out using sodium hydroxide aqueous solution. Either κC-g-PMAM or hydrolyzed κC-g-PMAM (PMAM: polymethacrylamide) was characterized by FT-IR spectroscopy. The effect of grafting variables (i.e. concentration of MBA, MAM, and APS) and alkaline hydrolysis conditions (i.e. NaOH concentration, hydrolysis time and... 

A new type of collapsible soil was encountered in Southern Iran and caused some serious technical problems including subsidence, collapse and sinkholes during the construction of Zahedan-Chabahar railway. Field observations indicated that in-situ soil contains excessive amount of salts resulting in dispersive features in response to seepage forces in addition to its collapsibility. Therefore, a systematic research plan including field sampling and laboratory testing was carried out to investigate the observed geotechnical features. Results of physio-chemical tests revealed the dominance of Sodium in excess of 70% relative to total dissolved salts, which results in high dispersive potential.... 

This paper presents a bi-objective VMI problem in a single manufacturer-single vendor multi-retailer (SM-SV-MR) supply chain, which a redundancy allocation problem is incorporated. In the hybridized problem, a manufacturer produces a single item using several machines that work in series, and stores it in a warehouse to replenish one vendor who delivers it to several retailers using the shortest possible route. A novel meta-heuristic, called hybrid bat algorithm (HBA), with calibrated parameters is utilized to find a near-optimum solution. To show the efficiency of HBA, the results are compared to the ones using the traditional BA and a genetic algorithm  

The vendor-managed inventory (VMI) is a common policy in supply chain management (SCM) to reduce bullwhip effects. Although different applications of VMI have been proposed in the literature, the multi-vendor multi-retailer single-warehouse (MV-MR-SW) case has not been investigated yet. This paper develops a constrained MV-MR-SW supply chain, in which both the space and the annual number of orders of the central warehouse are limited. The goal is to find the order quantities along with the number of shipments received by retailers and vendors such that the total inventory cost of the chain is minimized. Since the problem is formulated into an integer nonlinear programming model, the... 

In this paper, a multi-item economic production quantity model with fuzzy demand is developed in which shortages are backordered and the warehouse space is limited. While the demand is assumed to be a trapezoidal fuzzy number, the centroid defuzzification method is used to defuzzify fuzzy output functions. The Lagrangian relaxation procedure is first employed to solve the problem. Then, the model is extended to a constrained fuzzy integer nonlinear programming, in order to suit real-world situations. As the extended model cannot be solved in a reasonable time using exact methods, two meta-heuristic algorithms, named the genetic algorithm (GA) and the particle swarm optimisation (PSO) each... 

Accumulative roll bonding (ARB) is one of the effective severe plastic deformation methods for developing very fine grained nanostructures. In the present work, grain refinement and microstructural changes of magnesium AZ31 alloy during ARB process was investigated. Sheet specimens up to 256 cold welded layers (eight ARB cycles) were prepared. Evolution of the microstructure was observed using optical microscopy. It is shown that various mechanisms such as rotational recrystallisation (RRX) and twinning are involved in grain refinement at different passes. Increasing the number of ARB cycles leads to an ultra fine grain (UFG) microstructure (almost 500 nm) surrounded by nanoscale grain zones... 

With IoT devices becoming abundant and WSN applications becoming evermore present, the once dream of ubiquitous connectivity is closer to realization than ever before. but this realization is hindered by many technical problems and lengthy time to markets. Currently, our best practice of feasibility analysis relies in the same simulators used to model and develop the network applications. Because of their broad range and immense usability challenges, these jack-of-all-trades simulators tend to be computation-intensive and hard to work with.Here, we propose a relatively light-weight simulator based on the analytical models of different parts of the network to aid in rapid development and ease... 

Newly developed 3D die stacking technologies affords us the possibility to revisit the idea of Processing-in-Memory (PIM) as implementation hurdles are overcome. We now have the opportunity to offload the data intensive parts of our program to the PIM in form of kernels to be able to take advantage of the high internal bandwidth of the memory modules. Memory access latency and bandwidth are two major bottlenecks in today’s high-performance computers and new use-cases are moving faster than ever before towards this mode of computing. With new graph processing and neural network applications being developed every day, having a performance model of such systems helps in predicting the behavior... 

This work presents a case for general support for processing-in-memory (PIM) in compilers and puts forth an approach to face it along with a simple model. The ultimate goal of the work is to implement the features in a general-purpose compiler that can compile for any homogeneous ISA system, so the benefits from PIM are not limited to niche use-cases. © 2013 IEEE