Sharif Digital Repository

In this study, we intend to examine the effect of physicians’ leisure and parents’ preferences on the choice of the date of C-section. According to the literature, the comfort and convenience of the physician is one of the main factors contributing to the fact that less C-sections are scheduled on weekends compared to other days. On the other hand, avoidance of C-section on the 13th of the month as well as increase of C-section on certain special dates has been observed in different counties. In this study, we use national birth data in Iran from 2013 through 2017. During this period, cesarean rate was about 50% nationwide. According to the results, C-section is reduced by 72%, 42% and 12%... 

Increasing the power of a turbocharged diesel engine without changing main engine components is important in industrial applications, with economic benefits. The engine power can be increased by higher boost pressure. In this research, the turbocharged diesel engine performance improvement was investigated to increase the engine power. As a case study, the performance improvement of OM355A turbocharged diesel engine carried out. For this purpose, the engine was modeled in boost module of the AVL software. First, naturally aspirated OM355 and turbocharged OM355A diesel engines were modeled. Then the simulation results were evaluated in compare with engine tests data. Maximum difference in... 

Natural language processing has been used in solving the problems of humanities, including linguistics and analysis of religious books, such as the Bible, the Torah, and the Quran. One of the challenges in this field is the analysis of issues using the Quran. The problem in this issue is that a person becomes prejudiced in order to analyze the issues and makes incorrect judgements either inadvertently or intentionally based on his/her intellectual background. The same applies to analysis of issues based on the Quran. The method of analysis in this research is to produce an Arabic text based on the language of the Quran by receiving subjects in Persian. In order to achieve this goal, three... 

In this thesis one of the sensorless methods which exploits the existing anisotropies of the rotor is utilized to estimate rotor position. In order to implement this method, first a high frequency voltage is injected in a specific, time-varying direction and then the corresponding current response would be observed in order to estimate the rotor saliency position. The estimation of rotor position would be more precise as the magnetic anisotropy due to rotor saliency increases and as a result the effect of noise and different disturbances in estimation of rotor position would be decresed. The effect of stator resistence is one of these disturbances which is usually neglected as a result of... 

The three-phase Dual Active Bridge DC-DC converter, by virtue of its various advantages, has been widely used in numerous industrial and sensitive applications. However, this converter includes a large number of power switching devices, which are the most fragile components in Power Electronics, and therefore, can pose a threat to appropriateness of the converter for such applications. Accordingly, introducing a fault-tolerant scheme for this converter is necessary, in order to meet the demands of high reliability and service continuity in aforementioned applications. In this thesis, firstly, the converter is studied during normal operation as well as under switch open-circuit fault, and the... 

The Fukushima accident is one of the reasons why the spent fuel pool (SFP) is an important safety element. The large amount of spent fuel inside the spent fuel pool has made it a source of hydrogen and radioactive material in the accident of any disturbance to pool cooling. Although the loss of spent fuel pool cooling system accident has a slow transient, it can lead to disasters if you ignore it. In this project, spent fuel pool of Bushehr Power Plant unit ‘I’ was simulated by Ansys Fluent and the natural circulation of fluids in the absence of cooling system was investigated. The distribution of water temperature in the pool was investigated for the worst possible spent fuel pool loading... 

Steganalysis is the process of discovering existence of hidden data in a file or image. Recent advances in steganographic methods result in their wide use in secure communications applications. Reports of using information hiding by criminals to send messages, and malwares to communicate to servers, emphasizes importance of steganalysis in real time applications. Due to wide use of JPEG images in social media and internet, steganalysis of JPEG images is a highly active research topic in information hiding. Number of steganographic tools available for steganography in JPEG domain, shows importance of steganalysis of this image format. Classic Steganalysis techniques combine feature... 

Statistical studies indicate the fact that in Iran, like many other developing countries, a significant percentage of buildings are made of traditional materials and most of them are adobe buildings especially in rural areas. Furthermore, geological data indicates that Iran is located in alps-Himalayas seismic zone and exposed by destructive earthquakes and adobe buildings suffer the most damages comparing with other type of the structures. According to these explanations, this research deals with adobe buildings behavior and provides solutions for reinforcing them and improving the seismic response of these buildings. These studies include numerical modeling with finite elements methods by... 

In this thesis we consider the problem of distributed computation by many processors.We mainly concentrate on matrix multiplication problem in this thesis because of its importance. A distributed system consists of N worker processors and one master processor. The master processor should distribute the computation between workers and after computation in each of them, collect the results. In this thesis, we are going to mitigate the effect of straggler processors by using coding methods. Straggler processors can cause delays in the computation time.In this thesis, we firstly introduce a method to multiply any number of matrices in each other. The proposed method occurred in one shot without... 

The main goal of current investigation was partial reduction of Fe2O3 available in Hematite-rich ore to Magnetite by Fludization Bed method. The reductive gas, CO, was produced by incomplete combustion of Acetylene and Airmixed in inappropriate ratio. X-Ray Diffraction and X-Ray Florescence analyses were implemented in order to conducting qualitative analysis of present phases before and after reduction of the ore. Quantitative analysis of the same phases was also conducted by Titration. The latter analysis revealed the precise magnitude of available iron in each of the oxide containing phases. The chemical composition of the reactor gas was also determined before and after reduction... 

Abstract The problem of competetive facility location can be defined as follows: There are a number of customers in the form of points in space, and two players arrange a number of facilities in the form of points in space, given some limitations, respectively. Each customer’s connection to each facility has a cost for the customer and an advantage for the facility, and each customer wants to be connected to at most one of the facilities which has the lowest cost for him. The goal is to find the strategy of placing the facilities and determining the cost which the facility receives from the customer, in such a way that the player’s profit is maximised.In this thesis, we first sought to... 

Zero knowledge proofs allow a person (prover) to convince another person (verifier) that he has performed a specific computation on a secret data correctly, and has obtained a true answer, without having to disclose the secret data. QAP (Quadratic Arithmetic Program) based zkSNARKs (zero knowledge Succinct Non-interactive Argument of Knowledge) are a type of zero knowledge proof. They have several properties that make them attractive in practice, e.g. verifier's work is very easy. So they are used in many areas such as Blockchain and cloud computing. But yet prover's work in QAP based zkSNARKs is heavy, therefore, it may not be possible for a prover with limited processing resource to run... 

Lightweight clients are a type of blockchain users who do not store all the blocks in the blockchain due to limited resources. These users store only a small part of each block and when needed, request transactions from full nodes that store the entire blockchain. These users have no role in block validation and only want to receive transactions related to their addresses with proof of the inclusion in the block from full nodes.Since light clients rely on full nodes for receiving transactions, their privacy against full nodes is important. The current implementation of Bitcoin uses Bloom filters for privacy, but this offers very little privacy to the users.In this thesis, we study the... 

The petroleum industry is one of the technological applications which more platinum-group metals (PGM) employs. Therefore, the recovery of the PGMs from the waste catalysts of petroleum industry could be an important source to obtain these precious metals, with economic and environmental consequences.
In this work, the recovery of platinum and palladium from petroleum catalysts has been studied using waste RG-582 and LD-265 catalysts. Both catalyst were characterized through XRF, XRD and AAS. Aqua regia used as a leaching agent and The effect of dissolution temperature and time, liquid/ solid ratio (L/S), size of particles and elimination of coke was investigated. Under optimized... 

Nowadays, we are forced to use distributed computing due to the growth of data, the challenge of storing and processing it, as well as the emergence of new problems in machine learning and the complexity of the models. In distributed computing, the computation is per- formed by a distributed system consisting of several worker nodes such that, the main task is divided into several smaller tasks and assigned to each worker node. Then, different worker nodes will cooperate to accomplish the main task. Although distributed systems are efficient in solving problems and dealing with the mentioned challenges, they are vulnerable to the presence of stragglers, adversarial worker nodes, high... 

Payment channel networks (PCNs) are a promising technology to improve the scalability of cryptocurrencies. Users can send instant and almost free transactions via payment channel networks and, at the same time, enjoy the security guarantees of Blockchains. In order to open a mutual payment channel, two users should send a ``channel creation" transaction to the underlying Blockchain. Through this transaction, two parties deposit some money on the Blockchain. This money, which we call the channel's capacity, can be used to send off-chain transactions between the two users. After the channel creation, the channel-holders can send each other off-chain transactions by forwarding the money back... 

Power system frequency regulation entitled load frequency control (LFC) has been one of the important control problems in electric power system design and operation. Off-normal frequency can directly impact on power system operation and system reliability. A large frequency deviation can damage equipment, degrade load performance, cause the transmission lines to be overloaded and can interfere with system protection schemes, ultimately leading to an unstable condition for the power system . On the other hand, the increasing need for electrical energy in the 21st century, as well as limited fossil fuel reserves and the increasing concerns with environmental issues for the reduction of carbon...