Sharif Digital Repository

The mathematical techniques of decision making are among the most valuable outcomes of this research activity, which is generally referred to as realization in the operations, operational research or quantitative methods of decision making. Over time, with the increase in the complexity and the variety of decision making problems, the methods of decision making become more varied and will have more capability of problem solving. Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) is a collection of methodologies to compare, select, or rank multiple alternatives that involve incommensurate attributes. Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) method is a multiple criteria... 

Hybrid nanofluids have several advantages compared with the conventional types due to their modified properties. Their enhanced thermophysical and rheological properties make them more appropriate for solar energy systems. In this review paper, an overview of solar energy systems is represented, and afterwards, applications of hybrid nanofluids in various solar technologies, especially solar thermal, are reviewed. Comparison between the nanofluidic systems, and the conventional ones is performed in order to gain a deeper insight into the advantages of using nanofluids. According to the results of the reviewed studies, the most important reason for performance enhancement of nanofluidic solar... 

Rate constants, k A, for the aromatic nucleophilic substitution reaction of 2-chloro-3,5-dinitropyridine with aniline were determined in different compositions of 2-propanol mixed with hexane, benzene, and 2-methylpropan-2-ol and 1-ethyl-3-methylimidazolium ethylsulfate ([Emim][EtSO4]) with dimethyl sulfoxide at 25 C. The obtained rate constants of the reaction in pure solvents are in the following order: 2-methylpropan-2-ol > dimethyl sulfoxide > 2-propanol > hexane > benzene > [Emim][EtSO4]. Molecularmicroscopic solvent parameters corresponding to the selected binary mixtures were utilized to study the kinetics of a nucleophilic substitution reaction in order to investigate and compare the... 

Nanotechnology is widely used in heat transfer devices to improve thermal performance. Nanofluids can be applied in heat pipes to decrease thermal resistance and achieve a higher heat transfer capability. In the present article, a comprehensive literature review is performed on the nanofluids’ applications in heat pipes. Based on reviewed studies, nanofluids have a high capacity to boost the thermal behavior of various types of heat pipes such as conventional heat pipes, pulsating heat pipes, and thermosyphons. Besides, it is observed that there must be a selected amount of concentration for the high-performance utilization of nanoparticles; high concentration of nanoparticles causes a... 

Predicting the hydrodynamic coefficients of an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) is important during vehicle design. SUT-2 is an AUV. being developed by the Marine Engineering Research Center of Sharif University of Technology in Iran (MERC). Model tests are done in the marine engineering laboratory towing tank. In tins research, hydrodynamic coefficients are calculated using model test results of an autonomous underwater vehicle. Hydrodynamic forces are also analyzed. These coefficients are used for dynamic modeling and autonomous controller design  

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are at the heart of several machine learning applications, while they suffer from computational complexity due to their large number of parameters and operations. Recently, all-optical implementation of the CNNs has achieved many attentions, however, the recently proposed optical architectures for CNNs cannot fully utilize the tremendous capabilities of optical processing, due to the required electro-optical conversions in-between successive layers. To implement an all-optical multi-layer CNN, it is essential to optically implement all required operations, namely convolution, summation of channels' output for each convolutional kernel feeding the... 

The classification performance of all-optical Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) is greatly influenced by components’ misalignment and translation of input images in the practical applications. In this paper, we propose a free-space all-optical CNN (named Trans-ONN) which accurately classifies translated images in the horizontal, vertical, or diagonal directions. Trans-ONN takes advantages of an optical motion pooling layer which provides the translation invariance property by implementing different optical masks in the Fourier plane for classifying translated test images. Moreover, to enhance the translation invariance property, global average pooling (GAP) is utilized in the Trans-ONN... 

Enzymatic removal of Bisphenol A (BPA), acknowledged as an environmentally friendly approach, is a promising method to deal with hard degradable contaminants. However, the application of “enzymatic treatment” has been limited due to lower operational stability and practical difficulties associated with recovery and recycling. Enzyme immobilization is an innovative approach which circumvents these drawbacks. In this study, laccase from Trametes hirsuta was used for BPA removal. Amino-functionalized magnetic Fe3O4 nanoparticles were synthesized via the co-precipitation method followed by surface modification with (3-aminopropyl)trimethoxysilane (APTMS). The as-prepared nanoparticles were... 

The presence of pharmaceutical micropollutants in water and wastewater is considered a serious environmental issue. To eliminate these pollutants, biodegradation of pharmaceuticals using enzymes such as laccase, is proposed as a green method. In this study, immobilized laccase was used for the removal of two model pharmaceutical compounds, carbamazepine and diclofenac. Polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF) membrane modified with multi-walled carbon nanotubes (MWCNTs) were synthesized as a tailor-made support for enzyme immobilization. Covalently immobilized laccase from Trametes hirsuta exhibited remarkable activity and activity recovery of 4.47 U/cm2 and 38.31%, respectively. The results also... 

In order to attain an efficient path into the enhancement of the sustainable conservation and management of energy resources in the buildings and residential sections, efforts by all relevant institutions in the area of energy are essential and primitive. Hence, the development of the energy supply model in the building and the provision of fundamental solutions in this area is rudimentary. The key to any program related to this matter is to boost and extend energy efficiency and energy resource management. According to the global statistics and processed data, the residential sector accounts for 34 percent of the total energy consumption in Iran, which is the highest energy consumption... 

Solar chimney is one of the attractive approaches to produce power from a clean source of renewable energy. In this investigation, a potentiometric study is carried out to find out a best location for construction of a solar chimney in different climates of Iran, in the Middle East. With this objective, three locations with different weather climates were chosen, i.e. Tehran, Semnan, and Bandar Abbas. These locations were chosen due to their different climatic conditions and solar irradiation. The used weather conditions are extracted for the middle day of summer, 6th August. The output power of the solar chimney plant was assessed as a function of various thermo-physical properties such as... 

Optimal Reactive Power Dispatch (ORPD) has a salient impact on decreasing the power loss of transmission lines and adjusting the voltage deviation. The parameters that are used for the ORPD are tap settings of transformers, voltages of generating plants and the output of compensating device such as capacitor banks and synchronous condensors. In this paper settings of FACTS devices are considered as additional parameters in solving the ORPD problem. Also the genetic algorithm has been used to find the optimal settings of the controlling parameters. The results of the ORPD have been obtained on a 30 bus IEEE network. © 2009 IEEE  

Despite various optical realizations of convolutional neural networks (CNNs), optical implementation of nonlinear activation functions and pooling operations are still challenging problems. In this regard, this paper proposes an optical saturable absorption nonlinearity and its atomic-level model, as well as two various optical pooling operations, namely optical average pooling and optical motion pooling, by means of 4f optical correlators. Proposing these optical building blocks not only speed up the neural networks due to negligible optical processing latency, but also facilitate the concatenation of optical convolutional layers with no optoelectrical conversions in-between, as the... 

One of the most important obligations of privacy-enhancing technologies is to bring confidentiality and privacy to users' browsing activities on the Internet. The website fingerprinting attack enables a local passive eavesdropper to predict the target user's browsing activities even she uses anonymous technologies, such as VPNs, IPsec, and Tor. Recently, the growth of deep learning empowers adversaries to conduct the website fingerprinting attack with higher accuracy. In this paper, we propose a new defense against website fingerprinting attack using adversarial deep learning approaches called Adversarial Website Adaptation (AWA). AWA creates a transformer set in each run so that each...