Sharif Digital Repository

According to the growth in the world population and the decrease in fossil fuels resources and also according to the pollution caused by these unrenewable resources, using hydrogen as an alternative energy resource seems to be unavoidable. In the past decades, semi-conductor metal oxides were being used widely in the energy domain of study, due to their appropriate band gap in the ultra-violet and visible spectra. Among these metal oxides, ZnO has been under special attention because of its electron mobility and its reasonable production cost and also its friendliness to environment. But the high band gap of ZnO (3.2 eV) has impeded its use in visible light spectrum. In this project,... 

The sustainable development in societies and the global energy challenge requires usage of clean energy systems that have attracted the attention of many researchers in recent decades. One of the major challenges in generating renewable resources is the problem of energy storage and imbalance between supply and demand cycles. Hydrogen as one of the clean energy carriers and due to having the highest energy density in terms of weight, is one of the important research topics. From this point of view, the preparation of electrocatalysts for hydrogen production, based on available materials, via simple and environmentally friendly production methods, was considered in this research.... 

Nowadays, microgyroscopes are among the most important products of MEMS. The production of small, precise and inexpensive gyroscopes has become possible as the result of recent developments in fabrication technology. In this thesis it is intended to introduce a new method for manufacturing more precise microgyroscopes regarding manufacture facilities. Using this new method, sensitivity and resistance of microgyroscopes are increased against noises which are primarily caused by vibration and rotation about undesirable axes. The rotational movement imposed on the gyro is detected through fluid flow within its torus channel. This transformation facilitates the measurement of the initial motion.... 

With altering natural state and increasing impervious surfaces, traditional urbanization leads to deteriorating the environment and water catchments. During the years most efforts in order to control the urban runoff outflow, have been focused on quantity; and awareness about improving water quality has been raised just in the last few years and, which emphasizes on pollution source control. Standard water quality sampling methods are time consuming, expensive and because of sampling in broad geographic areas, difficult; however modeling is a more efficient way in assessing water quality and as worries about non-point source pollution grows, different kinds of models have been used to... 

In this project Deployment of multi-agent systems was studied. Maximum coverage over a point or curve or area is desired in deployment of multi-agent systems. A facility location optimization function was derived from geometrical concepts such as voronoi, n- geometric median and fermat-weber problem by optimization of which the deployment of multi-agent systems is performed. First, it is assumed that dynamic of agents is first order and second order .Next, it is assumed that agents are in a fluid. In all situations a suitable control algorithm was derived to optimize the facility location function to perform deployment. Next, another facility location function was derived by optimization... 

Concrete structures require reinforcement and retrofitting because of possible mistakes in design or calculation, inconformity between plan and implementation, change in occupancy or applied loads, and decay. Development in technology, production of materials, and new methods play important roles in development of structure construction and reinforcement methods. Emerge of new materials creates great demand in studying, surveying, and determining design characteristic and criteria for these materials. One of these materials is FRP composite which is used in concrete structure reinforcement in different ways. In this laboratory research, the effect of external wrapping by GFRP composite... 

Cost-effective and reliable damage detection is critical for utilization of composite materials. This research investigates a wavelet-based approach for SHM and detection of through-thickness crack in different lengths and angles in [0/45/-45/90]s CF/EP composite plate utilizing ANSYS finite element method (FEM) software and digital signal processing technique utilizing MATLAB software. To this end, a dual-PZT actuation scheme is applied, aimed at generating the S0 mode at a square composite plate. This study contributes to the damage detection by developing an improved wavelet-based signal processing technique that enhances the visibility and interpretation of the Lamb wave signals related... 

In recent two decades, different anonymous communication systems has been proposed. These systems are interested by journalists, bank employees, military forces, and human rights advocates. Tor is one of the most popular anonymous communication systems. Tor uses onion routing for privacy preserving. Re-cently, many attacks has been introduced against the anonymity of Tor users.In these attacks entry and exit nodes are compromised. One of these malicious nodes, makes the attack on the intented flow and the other one recognizes the flow. All these attacks admit their vulnerability against dummy messages. They state that, because of dynamics of onion’s keys, any dummy injection will dis-turb... 

Recently many organizations outsource their data to an external server due to easier data maintenance. One of the security issues in data outsourcing scenario is the enforcement of data owner’s access control policies. This includes some challenges; namely, the number of keys needed to access authorized resources, efficient policy updating, write access control enforcement, user and data owner overhead, and preserving confidentiality of data and policies . Most of the existing proposed solutions address only some of these challenges, while they impose high overhead on both the data owner and users. Moreover, most of them address enfrocement of policies in form of access control matrix and... 

Because of the working conditions of semiconductors at ambient temperature and pressure, degradation of organic pollutants through semiconductors photocatalysis has attracted the interest of many researchers. Because of its large exciton binding energy,high chemical and physical stability,high electron and hole mobility, and low cost; zinc oxide, an n-type semiconductor with 3.2 eV direct band gap, is widely used in applications such as photocatalysts, solar cells, and light-emitting diodes. Among various morphologies of ZnO, 1D nanostructures such as nanowires and nanorods have recieved much attention due to their high surface to volume ratio. However, the application of ZnO as a... 

Nowadays, multi-agent robotic systems are implemented to perform various operations such as military mission, search and rescue operations, etc. One of the most interested robotic platforms for multi-agent systems is quadrotor aerial robot. In this paper, a team of quadrotors is prepared to perform a formation flight toward a specified target in order to catch and transport it on a desired path. Therefore, at first, trajectory tracking control of the quadrotor has been studied and two types of controllers have been introduced: Hierarchical controller and Non-hierarchical controller. Coordinate free structure of the hierarchical controller provides distinctive properties and guarantees... 

Activated carbon, as an adsorbent with a high adsorption capacity and low cost, has many applications in liquid and gas adsorption processes. Among the adsorption of liquid phase, there are examples of drinking water purification, wastewater treatment, food industry, brewery, chemical separation (acids, amines, glycerin and glycols), enzymes ... and in adsorption from the gas phase there are examples of removing toxic compounds Containing sulfur and recycling sulfur, purifying biogas, use in gas masks, etc. Various materials can be used as raw material to make activated carbon. Materials such as walnut, almonds, coconut, pine, corn, etc. In this thesis, a feasibility study on the production... 

Massive MIMO systems are systems, where the base station has many number of antenna so each user’s channel is orthogonal to one another.These systems have some valuable advantages such as reduction of energy needed for transmission and significant improvement in spectral efficiency, which makes them be suitable for next generation of wireless communication systems. Another advantage of Massive MIMO systems is inherent resistance against passive eavsdroppers due to having a directed power radiation in direction of the desired user. However another physical layer attack threat these systems: attacking in pilot phase then eavsdropping in downlink phase which must taken care of in physical... 

The current study aimed to investigate the differential effects of multimedia input with no subtitle, subtitle, or caption (L2 subtitle) on vocabulary retention while controlling for the possible effects of students' vocabulary size and language aptitude as covariates. A total of 81 undergraduate university students were assigned to the study from three intact groups at Sharif University of Technology. All of the participants were Persian speakers and were in the age range of 18 and 22 years old; homogeneity of the students regarding their language proficiency was also established. During two different sessions, students' vocabulary size and language aptitude were measured. The groups were... 

The dRGT theory of massive gravity is a consistent theory of interacting massive spin 2 particles. As an effective field theory compared to observational data, its UV cutoff is rather low. Namely, unitarity is violated at low energies in scattering of longitudinal modes. In this dissertation, we give a brief review of the dRGT theory and its challenges. Of particular interest is the question of its UV completion in a more consistent model. Then, we show that this theory can be obtained from a topological gauge theory in one higher dimension. After dimensional reduction and symmetry breaking via boundary conditions, we obtained four dimensional effective field theories including the dRGT plus... 

Experiments conducted in recent two decades indicated critical behavior in neural activity at different scales. Theoretically occurrences of these critical and power-law behavior can significantly facilitate brain activities correspondent to computation and memory tasks, but attaining the critical point essentially demands externally fine-tuning which has not been established yet. This fine-tuning often lies with placing system at transition point. Recent studies of group showed that a transition from synchronous to asynchronous phase could be achievable by a change in external parameters. At the very transition point, neuronal avalanches statistically demonstrate a power-law behavior which... 

Recently, to improve the dynamic behavior of Reinforced Concrete (RC) slabs under impact load, the methods of externally bonding Glass Fiber Reinforced Polymer (GFRP) sheets to slab and internally reinforcing concrete by steel fibers have been proposed. Nevertheless, it is required to investigate the comparison between these two methods on response of RC slabs under impact loads. In this study, the influence of volume fraction of steel fibers, the number of GFRP sheet layers (one or two) and the arrangement of GFRP sheets (covering the whole or parts of surface), are examined. Performance of fourteen mm concrete slabs including one plain slab, one steel RC slab, three steel RC slabs...