Sharif Digital Repository

Nowadays, considering intense competition and the need for continuous improvement in organizations, research and development projects have attracted the attention of many organizations. Due to the intense competition and turbulence in the competitive market, there is a need for flexibility in the strategic decisions. In this thesis, we introduce a systematic framework for executive decision making within a strategic planning framework using the real options valuation method. This two-stage model first takes value of strategic projects in different periods considering the market effects of using the real options opportunity approach. Then the effect of this selection on all the options is... 

The level of current and voltage harmonics in power networks has been increased due to the widespread use of power electronic equipment. This increase may, in turn, result in damage to power system equipment in addition to extra power losses in the network. In order to assess the level of harmonics, it is required to monitor power networks using power quality analyzers. However, due to the high costs, only limited number of measurements can be used in practice. The task of harmonic state estimation is to identify the location and magnitude of harmonic sources and to estimate the harmonic voltage and current by partial measurements. Due to the high price of measurement instruments and... 

Pulsating heat pipes (PHP) are complex heat transfer devices which unlike conventional heat pipes do not contain any wick in their structure. The effective parameters consist of; working fluid, volumetric filling ratio, operational orientation and input heat power have been investigated here. The experimental set-up we have contemplated, fabricated and tested included five turns, made of copper tube coupled with two glass tube of internal diameter 1.8 mm. The height of evaporator, condenser and adiabatic section was 60, 60 and 150 mm, respectively. The evaporator was heated with electrical element connected to an AC variant power supply and the condenser was connected to a constant... 

The purpose of the present project is to construct and improve the quality of an absorbable membrane using a supercritical process and study the effects of the operative parameters. Today, usage of biodegradable polymers is intensively increasing and these kinds of polymers are used as drug delivery carrier and tissue engineering medium. A biodegradable membrane is suitable for this goal. In this study Poly Ethylene Glycol (PEG) is used as the biodegradable polymer. Gas anti-solvent (GAS) method was applied for the production of the membrane. The used anti-solvent was Supercritical Carbon Dioxide. In order to study the effects of the operative parameters on the structure of the produced... 

Reducing fossil fuels and increasing urban air pollution, has made the automotive industry to reduce the fuel consumption of their engines by various approaches. Removing the compressor of air conditioning system by replacing the absorption chiller instead of inverse rankin cycle is a shortcut to reduce the fuel consumption which at the same time reduces costs of using air conditioning system for occupants. Design of a 3 kW lithium bromide-water absorbent chiller has verified based on environmental conditions and car space limitations and using the combustion products as the heat source of system. K4M engine of L90 sedan Car as an internal combustion engine sample’s exhaust manifold has been... 

Nowadays Lab-on-a-chip systems are being widely used in medical applications, especially in analyzing minute volumes of blood for diagnosis and treatment of some crucial diaseses like diabetic. A Lab-on-a-chip is comprised of a variety of components such as micromixer, microdispenser, detection and separation units and so on. In this thesis, however, we have analyzed and numerically simulated a microdispenser which is electrokinetically driven. In other words, electrical potentials are applied to electrodes in order to conduct two fluids within a cross microchannel, and distribution of a sample fluid takes place due to appropriately applied potentials. In order to analyze and simulate the... 

Various application of polyethylene material in different industries caused to modern techniques for controlling and measuring specifications of micro-particle suspension. Many industries try to increase stability of suspensions in front of their phase separation.
Because of the consequences of suspension homogeneity, at first, we measured this property. Then, the stability was tested by three different methods. In the first method, the transmitted laser light was measured to assay the suspensions stability. In the second, number of sediments of particles was counted. Sedimentation velocity of particles was measured directly by using a horizontal microscope as the third method. The... 

In flexible pavements damage initially appears in the form of microcracking due to application of traffic and leads to creation of cracks after being subjected to more loading repetitions in a few years. According to the bitumen’s significant effect on self healing process of cracks in asphalt mixtures. It is plausible to improve the binder self healing performance and pavement lifetime using self healing additives. Forming self healing polymeric materials using nanoparticles has proved to be promising. However, the ability of nanoparticles to induce self healing properties in binder has to be investigated as well. In this study the self healing characteristics of neat and nanoclay modified... 

Nowadays energy consumption increases in our daily life and incredibly enhancement of growth rate can be seen recent years. Hence, the use of renewable energy is prioritized. Solar energy is one of the choices because it is free and available. In this research, it has been tried to get electrical and thermal power at a reasonable cost both during the day and night. The system is equipped with a linear parabolic concentrator with a collector installed in the center of the concentrator which has been installed on its faces photovoltaic cells and thermoelectric modules, and five different systems have been tested with different components. Also, the paraffin has been used as a phase change... 

The main purpose of this study was to increase the flow circulation within the flat plate oscillating heat pipes as a result Increase the heat transfer rate by placing diagonal grooves in the evaporator. The project in two stages a simple page and diagonal companion page are provided to investigate the effect of diagonal grooves. First a simple plate and then a second one with diagonal grooves in the evaporator it was made. Thermal performance of the heat pipes at each of the stages at different filling ratios of 40%, 50%, 60% and 70% for variable input capacities have been studied and compared. The results of the second stage showed that the performance of the new heat pipe at the optimum... 

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... 

Dissipative particle dynamics (DPD) is an emerging mesoscopic computational method in which the interparticle forces arise because of coarse-graining at the molecular level. In the asymptotic limit of large length scales, the governing equations of continuum are reproduced, as demonstrated in this work. This method of simulation has the capability of simulating larger order of time and space in compare with dynamic molecular method. One of the important applications of DPD is simulating the dilute polymer solution. In this project, we developed a general code to simulate dilute polymer behavior which consists of polymeric forces and different types of usual DPD boundary conditions. This code... 

Fatigue crack growth can have harmful effects on the reliability rotary machine. While an early warning to crack, can be used to extend the life of these expensive machines and increase reliability.Structural Vibration Condition Monitoring as a primary fault detection method, achieved to a lot amazing result and for this reason studies vibration behavior of cracked rotational shaft is a big issue for engineers of dynamic machine.In this research, first check the fault detection methods based on structural vibration condition monitoring, mode shape methods were extracted. Then by modeling rotational shaft in computer and creation of crack on it, fault detection quality of these methods have... 

It is important to provide an appropriate and economically method with technical and engineering considerations to stabilize excavated underground spaces. The necessity of this, especially for the construction of underground metro stations located in the cities which faces many problems, is more evident. In this research, it has been tried to introduce an optimal method according to the type of area for the construction of the underground station. In order to obtain stress and strain condition in structural elements and surface deformations due to different stages of excavating, numerical modeling in FLAC3D has been used. By examining the parameters that affect the sustainability of this... 

In the present study, the effects of increasing the value of shale gas production, either due to increased production or price increases, have been studied on economic variables such as employment, wage, property value and the number of births. In this regard, the data for each of these variables was used at the county level in the United States of America between 2000 and 2011. In order to estimate the desired effects, counties are divided into two types of boom and non-boom counties. The findings indicate that increasing natural gas production will lead to more employment and wage growth in boom counties than non-boom counties. Also, during the period of increasing production, the value of... 

Co-movement between inflation and nominal interest in response to an interest rate shock, dubbed neo-fisherianism, has been the subject of contentious debate since the advent of non-inflationary ZLB environment. We design an economic model rich with banking features to understand the economic responses to permanent and long-term interest rate shocks. We find that responses to a permanent positive interest rate shock depend on the monetary authorities’ speculation of the new long-term inflation rate, with the most probable outcome being a permanent increase in inflation. Responses to a long-term positive interest rate shock depict an increase and then decrease in inflation. We also discover... 

In this study, we aim to learn representations from microscopic cell images that effectively capture the features of drugs affecting the cells, allowing us to identify effective drugs for treating a disease. We employ two parallel learning paths using predictive and generative models. Specifically, we have achieved a predictive model on the RxRx19a dataset that, unlike previous models, is interpretable, optimized, and robust to dras- tic changes in drug properties. Additionally, we have developed the first generative model on this dataset, which not only generates high-quality images but also discovers a meaningful latent space. This latent space divides the representation into relevant... 

Traumatic brain injury (TBI) has long been known as one of the most anonymous reasons for death around the world. This phenomenon has been under study for many years and yet it remains a question due to physiological, geometrical and computational complexity. Due to limitation in experimental study on human head, the finite element human head model with precise geometric characteristics and mechanical properties is essential. In this study, the visco-hyperelastic parameters of bovine brain extracted from experimental data and finite element simulations which validated by experimental results. Then a 3D human head including brain, skull, and the meninges is modeled using CT-scan and MRI data... 

Ever-increasing energy consumption and consequent extensive greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are two major urgent problems faced by all human beings in the 21st century. As a major contributor, the energy production section appears to be the most suitable field where further improvements could be explored to tackle these problems. Multi carrier energy system is a typical type of next generation energy production technology with higher energy efficiency and lower/zero GHG emissions. The conversion of energy between different carriers establishes a coupling of the corresponding power flows resulting in system interactions. The investigation of such phenomena requires the development of tools for...