Sharif Digital Repository

This research considers the wind effects on the thermal deficiency of natural draught dry cooling tower (NDDCT) using the CFD tool. To have a realistic study, the NDDCT of Shazand Powerplant, located in Shazand, Iran, is simulated as the sample cooling tower design points. Considering of Shazand NDDCT model, the mal-effects of local wind were studied against its thermal efficiency. As is known, the thermal efficiency of a NDDCT can be affected by local wind in either its upper (i.e., outlet section) or lower (i.e., the radiator section) parts. In this study, a full study is performed to quantify the mal-effects of local wind on either upper or lower parts of one tower. The results show that... 

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... 

Language model is one of the most important parsts of an automated speech recognition system whiche incorporates the knowledge of Natural Language to the system to improve its accuracy. Conventionally used language model in recognition systems is ngram which usually is extracted from a large corpus using related frequency method. ngram model approximates the probability of a word sequence by multiplying its ngram probabilities and thus does not take into account the long distance dependencies. So, syntactic language models could be of interest. In this research after probing different syntactic language models, a mehtod for re-estimating ngram model, introduced by Stolcke in 1994, was... 

A method of joining dissimilar metals in the semi solid state is presented. By this method bonding of Stainless steel and semisolid aluminum alloy took place in this research. By usage of thermomechanical treatment, dendritic microstructure of cast aluminum alloy changed to globular structure. The experimental process of bonding occurred at semisolid temperature stage of aluminum alloy in a predesigned mold by using a pressure equipment. The relationship between interfacial shear strength and solid fraction of aluminum alloy, bonding pressure and time of keeping pressure were studied by method of orthogonal experiment. By the usage of Taguchi method in designing experiments, plurality of... 

The human speech conveys much information such as semantic contents, emotion and even speaker identity. Our goal in this thesis is the task of text-independent speaker identification (SI) in large population applications. Identification (test) time has become one of the most important issues in recent real time systems. Identification time depends on the cost of likelihood computation between test features and registered speaker models. For real time application of SI, system must identify an unknown speaker quickly. Hence the conventional SI methods cannot be used. The main goal in this thesis is to propose several methods that reduced identification time without any loss of identification... 

Measuring emotions of music is one of the methods to determine music content. Music emotion detection is applicable in music retrieval, recognition of music genre and also music data management softwares. Music emotion is considered in different sciences such as physiology, psychology, musicology and engineering. First, we collected a database of different types of music with various emotions. These data have been labeled according to their emotions. In this project, four emotions (Angry, happy, relax and sad) have been used as labels based on Thayer’s two dimension emotion model. There are two basic steps for music emotion recognition similar to other recognition systems: Feature extraction... 

Pricing users of the network in the congested Central Business District (CBD) will cause change in the travel behavior of the different sectors of these users . The problem of optimal pricing of CBD is formulated in this study as a bilevel optimization . The lower level problem is a joint trip production-distribution-mode choice-assignment problem , which identifies three groups of the users , namely shoppers , retailers and basic employees . The upper level problem maximizes total long-run benefit and minimizes air pollution and changes in attractions of the zones . The demand for shoppers and retailers is elastic , but that of the basic employees is assumed inelastic . The decision...