Sharif Digital Repository

In spite of succesfull achievements of standard quantum mechanics in describing variety of physical phenomenons, this theory has some conceptual problems in some areas. One of the important problems is the behavior of macroscopic objects and their interaction with microscopic systems, which is called “measurement problem”. Actually because the standard quantum mechanic is linear, it anticipates the occurrence of superposition of macroscopic states which is in contrast with our understanding of macroscopic objects. The standard theory answers this problem by using the wave function reduction principle.
There has been various proposals about the mechanism of wave function reduction,... 

Dark matter is one of the biggest unsolved problems in physics and cosmology. Almost 85 percent of the gravitational matter is not luminous and it’s properties is unknown. In recent decades variety of investigations regarding dark matter has been done which we will mention in the beginning part of this thesis. We continue testing MOdified gravity (MOG), Non-Local-Gravity (NLG) and MOdified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND) in a different scale by using the rotation curves of dwarf galaxies. In addition we compare MOG, MOND and NLG together to see which one better fit observed data. In another investigation that is reported in this thesis, we fit the observed acceleration data of galaxy cluster Abell... 

Storage is well-known as the performance bottleneck in I/O intensive programs such as online transaction processing applications; thus designing a cost-effective high performance disk subsystem is a major concern in enterprise applications. Data tiering is an efficient way to optimize cost, performance, and reliability in storage servers. With the promising advantages of Solid State Drives (SSDs) over Hard Disk Drives (HDDs) such as lower power consumption and higher performance , traditional data tiering techniques should be revisited in order to use SSDs in a more efficient way. This thesis presents a data tiering technique at the Operating System (OS) level to enhance system performance... 

Non-Volatile Memories (NVMs) are emerging storage devices with promising characteristics such as low static power consumption, high performance, and non-volatile property to keep the stored data in the absence of power supply. Despite such interesting characteristics, NVMs suffer from high dynamic power consumption and limited lifetime. These limitations prevent NVMs from directly replacing the existing storage devices without any refinement in the architecture of computer systems. In this dissertation, we first investigate the characteristics of emerging NVMs and offer effective architectures to improve the efficiency of computer systems at the Operating System (OS) level. The main aim of... 

Land use and transportation are interrelated, and as a result in cities’ development plans, there is a need for a model that can consider both of them simultaneously. The model presented in this study is bi-level. The upper level designs the zonal population and employment, and transportation network link capacities. Its objective is to minimize the total cost of residence, receiving goods and services, and transportation. The lower level consists of two inter-related problems. One of these problems determines the allocation of population and employment and the other obtains link flows by a joint bi-modal mode choice assignment model. This study aims to develop a meta-heuristic algorithm to... 

Nowadays, the atomic force microscopy (AFM) has become a useful laboratory tool with variety of applications. In the traditional imaging technique, usually the amplitude or frequency of AFM tip oscillations is set at a desired value using a feedback control system which is a relatively slow process. In the current research, we propose an estimation approach which uses an adaptive fading extended Kalman filter (augmented with forgetting factor) as a system observer and couples with the system dynamics to determine the sample topography. As a result, in addition to state variables of system dynamic, the sample height as an unknown parameter is estimated with high accuracy in a relatively short... 

Due to the high level abstraction inherent in most formal specifications and the need to formally specify and develop nondeterministic systems, such as concurrent, probabilistic, and game-like ones, nondeterminism comes into formal specifications inevitably. As it will be shown in this thesis, after developing programs constructively from implicitly nondeterministic specifications, which have been written in the CZ (constructive Z) specification language, only one of the allowable, specified behaviors will appear in final programs. In this way, the implementer will be provided with only one of the possible implementations that is not necessarily the best one. When the nondeterminism involved... 

Energy crisis is one of the crises which human beings face these days. Optimizing the operation of energy consuming machines is one of the most effective methods in decreasing energy consumption. Gasoline direct injection engines as new achievements in automobile and propulsion industry, reduce fuel consumption by increasing the engine efficiency. In these types of engines, a high pressure injector injects fuel directly into the combustion chamber instead of injecting fuel in intake ports. Thus, because of evaporation cooling, the mixture cools down, so the possibility of achieving higher compression ratios in higher engine speeds and loads, without occurrence of knock is provided. Increase... 

This thesis describes a robust algorithm in speech recognition system based on phoneme recognition. Automatic speech recognition systems (ASR) can be divided into two main types: speaker-dependent continuous speech PC-based systems and speaker-independent continuous-speech server based systems. In speaker- independent systems, there is no need to have knowledge about the speaker(s) before using the system, on the other hand, in speaker dependent systems it is essential to have voice training by the speaker(s) supposed to work with the system. In this thesis, a speaker-independent continuous speech PC-based system has been chosen to work with. Acoustic-phonetic approach has been chosen among... 

Water-gas shift reaction (CO(g) + H2O(g) ↔ CO2(g) + H2(g)) is performed as the key step in the hydrogen and ammonia industrial plant. In this work, Fe/Cr/Cu high temperature water gas shift catalysts were synthesized by coprecipitation method, using sulfate precursors, in order to improve the catalytic performance and particular emphasis is placed on the catalytic activity affected by aging time, precipitating agent and ways of increasing the mechanical strength. Finally the prepared and industrial catalysts were compared when they were situated in the operating conditions (at 360oC and 2 bar) and were characterized by BET, XRD, TPR, TEM and crushing strength analysis. Catalysts being made... 

Apatite-coated Ag/AgBr/TiO2 was prepared by deposition of Ag as noble metal to generate electron-hole pairs by extending the excitation wavelength to visible light region, AgBr as photo-sensitizer to increasing yield of photo catalyst, and apatite as adsorption bio ceramic for adsorbing pollutants and micro organisms respectively. The bactericidal experiments in dark media indicated that only novel catalyst show inhibiting growth of bacteria. In this case Transmission electron microscopy image illustrated that catalyst nano particles adhere to the outer membrane of the cell and acts as inhibitor to nourish of bacteria from around media. The mechanism for deactivation E-Coli and B.Sub in the... 

Integrated SOFC plants, because of the high efficiency and optimum energy consumption, are important processes that have many applications. According to the importance of these plants, their optimum operability and favorable operations are also very important. One of the ways to optimize the process performance is the suitable selection of the control structures. The objective of this project is to analyze the operability or inherent controllability of integrated SOFC plants in the absence of any controller. In this work, the controllability of the process have been investigated with using the output controllability index and the other indexes such as relative gain array, singular value and... 

In this project, Fe3O4 magnetic nanoparticles were prepared by co-precipitation method. For protecting them against oxidation and also avoiding from direct contact between core and additional materials that probably makes unwanted reactions, the surface of nanoparticles were coated by SiO2 layer. Being easy to modify and having the control of interactions between nanoparticles are the advantages of coating nanoparticles with silica. The obtained Fe3O4@SiO2 core-shell nanoparticles were covered by two types of polymer (PPG and PEG). The basis of the composite was characterized by VSM, TGA, SEM, XRD, and FT-IR analytical methods.
The antibacterial activities of Copper, Silver and Gold... 

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...