Sharif Digital Repository

This study attempts to examine the natural gas fired power plants in Iran. The required data from natural gas fired power plants were gathered during 2008. The characteristics of thirty two gas turbine power plants and twenty steam power plants have been measured. Their emission factor values were then compared with the standards of Energy Protection Agency, Euro Union and World Bank. Emission factors of gas turbine and steam power plants show that gas turbine power plants have a better performance than steam power plants. For economic analysis, fuel consumption and environmental damages caused by the emitted pollutants are considered as cost functions; and electricity sales revenue are... 

In this paper, employing the definition of an effective configuration in the continuum damage mechanics, mechanical response of a compressible viscoelastic-viscoplastic material is investigated. We present a phenomenological viscoelastic-viscoplastic-viscodamage constitutive model, developed within the framework of irreversible thermodynamics. The formulation is based on the additive decomposition of the total strain into elastic, viscoelastic, and viscoplastic parts in the effective configuration. Thus, the Helmholtz energy is partitioned into elastic, elastic-viscoelastic, and viscoplastic parts. Then, each one is divided into deviatoric and volumetric energies. Considering the... 

Self-healing concrete materials have the capability to recover a part of the weakened mechanical properties induced by damage. In this paper, a constitutive model is proposed to investigate damage and healing phenomena in concrete materials. In order to consider the different behavior of concretes in tension and compression, a spectral decomposition of the stress is utilized. In addition, employing the Clausius-Duhem inequality and considering the irreversible thermodynamics, conjugate forces of the damage and healing are expressed. The Gibbs potential energy is decomposed into three parts: elastic, damage and healing. In this regard, damage and healing behavior are distinguished from the... 

In this paper, employing the Hencky strain, viscoelastic-viscoplastic response of self-healing materials is investigated. Considering the irreversible thermodynamics and using the effective configuration in the Continuum Damage-Healing Mechanics (CDHM), a phenomenological finite strain viscoelastic-viscoplastic constitutive model is presented. Considering finite viscoelastic and viscoplastic deformations, total deformation gradient is multiplicatively decomposed into viscoelastic and viscoplastic parts. Due to mathematical advantages and physical meaning of Hencky strain, this measure of strain is employed in the constitutive model development. In this regard, defining the damage and healing... 

Self-healing materials, as a class of intelligent materials, are capable to recover a part of the weakened mechanical properties induced by damage. In this article, based on the thermodynamics of irreversible processes, employing the effective configuration in the continuum damage-healing mechanics, a viscoelastic–viscoplastic constitutive model is presented. In the constitutive model development, we adopt an additive decomposition of the total strain into elastic, viscoelastic, and viscoplastic parts. In this regard, defining the damage and healing variables and employing the strain energy equivalence hypothesis, stress and strain tensors in the effective configuration are obtained.... 

In this study, the semi-clathrate hydrate dissociation pressure for the CO2+N2, CO2+H2, CO2+CH4, and pure CO2 systems in the presence of different concentrations of TBAB aqueous solutions is predicted using a strong machine learning technique of multi-layer perceptron neural network (MLP-NN). The developed model, with an overall correlation coefficient (R2) of 0.9961 and mean square error (MSE) of 5.96E−02, presented an excellent accuracy in prognosticating experimental data. A complete statistical evaluation performed to promise the strength and generality of the multi-layer perceptron artificial neural network (MLP-ANN). In addition, the applicability of the proposed network and quality of... 

The objective of this work was to study the microstructure of as cast, solution treated and overaged Rene 80 superalloy before and after welding treatment. Studies focused on identifying heat affected zone (HAZ) liquation cracking mechanism and the effect of preweld microstructure on it. The formation of HAZ liquation cracking or microfissuring is found to be strongly dependent on constitutional liquation of grain boundary precipitates. These liquated precipitates in the as cast state contain MC carbides and particularly γ/γ' eutectic islands. While in the overaged condition they consist of the MC carbides and borides. Also HAZ grain boundary liquation and subsequent resolidification occur... 

In the present study, the solubility of paracetamol in supercritical CO2 is measured at temperatures between 311 and 358 K and pressures between 95 and 265 bar. It was shown that the solubility of paracetamol through a static solubility measurement method was between 0.3055 × 10−6 to 16.3582 × 10−6 based on mole fraction. The obtained experimental solubility data revealed the direct effect of pressure on the paracetamol experimental data, while the temperature has a dual effect of both increasing and decreasing effect considering the shifting point known as crossover pressure which was measured to be around 110 bar for paracetamol. Besides, two theoretical approaches were applied to predict... 

Today, the production of energy and electricity is one of the major concerns of mankind. Electricity generation by solar energy is considered as one of the alternatives to fossil fuels. Solar chimneys mechanism is based on a natural phenomenon. In this process the solar energy heat up the earth's surface and the surrounding air. Due to the density difference between cold air and warm air, heated air ascends and causes air circulation. In this study, mathematical modelling of solar chimney and governing equations of this system will be discussed. In order to validate the numerical results, upwind velocity in chimney has been compared with a reliable reference results. As well as, the... 

Low swirl flame characteristics under external flow excitations are numerically investigated using large eddy simulations with a dynamically thickened flame combustion model. A finite volume scheme on a Cartesian grid with a dynamic one equation eddy viscosity subgrid scale model is used for large eddy simulations. The excitations are imposed on inlet velocity profiles by a sinusoidal forcing function over a wide range of amplitudes and frequencies. Present investigation shows that although, the swirling motion of the low swirl flame is not intense enough to induce a recirculation zone in ensemble averaged results, external flow excitations increase the local swirl number upstream of the... 

Over the past few decades, biological hazards and organic pollution have become major environmental concerns. Photocatalysis has been found to be effective in minimizing the negative impacts of these issues in air and water. Lozenge shape Ag/AgCl/ZnTiO3 photocatalysts were fabricated by a facile two-step synthesis method, including hydrothermal and coprecipitation. The physicochemical characteristics and morphological properties of the structures were comprehensively described taking advantage of a multi-technique approach. The prepared photocatalysts offered excellent nitrophenol mineralization (>90%) after 90 min of visible light irradiation. Based on the spin-trapping ESR technique, •O2̅–... 

Shape memory polymers (SMPs) are a class of smart materials which can recover their shape even after many shape changes in application of an external stimulus. In this paper, flexural behavior of a composite beam, constructed of a corrugated part filled with SMPs, is studied. This composite beam is applicable in sensor and actuator applications. Since the corrugated profiles display higher stiffness-to-mass ratio in the transverse to the corrugation direction, the beams with a corrugated part along the transverse direction are stiffer than ones with a corrugated part along the length. Employing a developed constitutive model for SMPs and the Euler–Bernoulli beam theory, the behavior of the... 

The preparation and characterization of new heteronuclear-platinum(ii) complexes containing a 1,1'-bis(diphenylphosphino)ferrocene (dppf) ligand are described. The reaction of the known starting complex [PtMe(κ2N,C-bipyO-H)(SMe2)], A, in which bipyO-H is a cyclometalated rollover 2,2'-bipyridine N-oxide, with the dppf ligand in a 2:1 ratio or an equimolar ratio led to the formation of the corresponding binuclear complex [Pt2Me2(κ2N,C-bipyO-H)2(μ-dppf)], 1, or the mononuclear complex [PtMe(κ1C-bipyO-H)(dppf)], 2, respectively. According to the reaction conditions, the dppf ligand in 1 and 2 behaves as either a bridging or chelating ligand. All complexes were characterized by NMR spectroscopy.... 

In this paper, we experimentally investigate the statistical distribution of intensity fluctuations for underwater wireless optical channels under different channel conditions, namely fresh and salty underwater channels with and without air bubbles. To do so, we first measure the received optical signal with a large number of samples. Based on the normalized acquired data the channel coherence time and the fluctuations probability density function (PDF) are obtained for different channel scenarios. Our experimental results show that salt attenuates the received signal while air bubbles mainly introduce severe intensity fluctuations. Moreover, we observe that log-normal distribution precisely... 

In this paper, we present an optical computing method for string data alignment applicable to genome information analysis. By applying moire technique to spatial encoding patterns of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) sequences, association information of the genome and the expressed phenotypes could more effectively be extracted. Such moire fringes reveal occurrence of matching, deletion and insertion between DNA sequences providing useful visualized information for prediction of gene function and classification of species. Furthermore, by applying a cylindrical lens, a new technique is proposed to map two-dimensional (2D) association information to a one-dimensional (1D) column of pixels, where...