Sharif Digital Repository

In this paper, the general research of impedance control is addressed for a robotic manipulator with a moving flexible base. Impedance control imposes a relation between force and displacement at the contact point with the environment. The concept of impedance control of flexible base moving manipulators (FBMM) is rather new and is being considered. The dynamic of manipulator is decomposed into slow and fast dynamics using singular perturbation method. New sliding mode impedance control method (SMIC), using an element on the end effector is proposed for high precision impedance control of FBMM. The sliding mode impedance control method as a robust impedance control law is derived for the... 

Integrated design includes CAD, process planning and CNC code generation based on an integrated data structure. To enable different CAD/CAM software solutions to be interoperable, it is required to support data exchange in manufacturing enterprises. To realize interoperability there are two basic approaches: i. to focus on STEP standard to support data exchange between CAD systems as well as CAPP/CAM and CNC machining systems; the use of STEP standard ensures the data integration based on STEP standard. ii. utilizing a platform consists of structures and procedures to enable exchange of data between different CAD/CAM/CAPP software applications seamlessly. In this article, the important... 

Control of two-arm flexible robot is studied in this research. The goal is to control the robot in order to carry a fluid tank installed in the top of the last arm, while the vibration of fluid must be damped. The equations governing the system are extracted by the energy method while Euler-Bernoulli beam is selected to model the elastic members. In order to develop the equations, all of the potential and kinematic energies due to rigid and elastic motions are calculated, then a proper controller is designed for the system to accomplish the considered missions. Since the system is classified as an under-actuated system, the exact feedback linearization method is not practical to control the... 

Preservation and survival of ecological systems by vegetation is important. A study focusing on the hydrodynamics of these complex ecosystems could help to explain the filtering ability of vegetation in wetlands and estuaries. Wetlands assist in flood control, shoreline protection, and groundwater recharge. In addition, they play a purification role in removing sediments and contaminants from polluted waters, nutrient uptake, and oxygen production.
Laboratory experiments have been designed to study the influence of marsh vegetation on lateral dispersion in flexible vegetation that has been modelled with inclined cylinder. The flow through vegetation is modelled by a circulating flow... 

In the Pay-TV industry, it is necessary to limit access of unauthorized users. Conditional Access System (CAS) is the solution. In the Pay-TV, the ability of instant join and leave operation is desirable for users. On the other hand, this characteristic is in contradiction with growth of user number.
Previous proposed conditional access systems address the requirement of pay-TV from several aspects. Key distribution management is on of them which plays a key role in the security and efficiency of a conditional access system. Re-examining the process of key distribution management make it possible to find a way to provide a greater flexibility for the users.
The purpose of this... 

Cogeneration technologies such as Combined Heat and Power (CHP) have promising features for providing the electrical energy that various industries require while reducing the emissions and other environmental impacts of these industries. Investments in CHP systems require substantial implementation costs followed by a relatively long period of recovering the invested capital through savings in utilities bills. Appropriate timing of CHP system investments can reduce capital expenses and enhance returns on investments. An appropriate investment valuation method is needed to identify the appropriate time to implement a given CHP system and to find the values of properly scheduled investments.... 

This study aimed to develop a green network design for a multi-echelon multi-product supply chain with a focus on bottleneck points as the means of enhancing unutilized capacities to maintain the optimal levels of flexibility. Two different models were developed to compare different approaches of flexible capacity planning by minimizing the total cost of facility establishment as well as their utilization and transportation cost. The proposed mixed-integer linear programming model was characterized by its novelty in taking bottleneck points into account to build a platform for flexible capacity planning required for responding to uncertainties such as fluctuations in demand and new product... 

Nowadays, small and big businesses do their best to automate their business process by using a workflow management system. Therefore, these systems play a key role in IT. By expansion of the business and ever-changing rules and procedures of organization, the need for consecutive changes to workflow management systems arises. The most challenging part of this change is the state of running instances. Previous solutions put the challenges of migrating instances, dealing with their inconsistencies and runtime errors on the users. It is worth noting that there are a few tools which consider instance migrations, but most of them lack a comprehensive viewpoint. Related solutions are often based... 

The Real Option Theory (ROT) offers a modern methodology for the valuation of an investment project because it considers the value of managerial flexibility facing project uncertainties. The present work seeks to study the Expand and Swich options value for a polymer plant investment project. Perhaps the most critical step of ROT is the estimation of the project volatility. This work also makes an effort to estimate the project volatility in different cases considering different possibilities of modeling the uncertain variables. The main uncertain variables that can positively affect the project value are the price of the raw material, the price of the product and the demand growth of the... 

With the development of fractional order calculus and more accurately modeling of physical phenomena, the problem of controlling these systems, by considering the uncertainties in the system, will become necessary and inevitable. In this thesis, the fractional order transfer function model of a satellite with Coupled rigid-flexible structures is used as the reference work of the research. To control this dynamical system, sliding mode control method, which is one of the robust control methods, has been used. It is clear that it is not possible to directly design a sliding mode controller for a transfer function. For this reason, a fractional order pseudo-state space model is first obtained... 

Natural gas liquefaction is an enabling technology which could make natural gas resources globally accessible. Nonetheless, the design and operation of LNG processes is highly complex, and is subject to multiple criteria including energetic, environmental and safety performance. Moreover, such processes must be flexible enough to operate under different feed conditions. The present research applies integrated process and product design framework to enhance simultaneously energy efficiency, environmental benignness, and inherent safety of a small-scale LNG process. The challenge is that the current group contribution methods applied for the estimation of the thermophysical properties, suffer... 

In recent decades, attention to renewable energy sources has been increased, and these resources will be an integral part of power systems in the future. Meeting the equilibrium point between power consumption and power generation at the power grid is of paramount importance. However, the equilibrium point is not solely dependent on the decisions of consumers and generation units and is influenced by other parameters as well. In this regard, penetration of renewable energies into the power system can affect this equilibrium point. These sources have random behavior, which will determine the future structure of the electricity grid. These sources can also change the shape of the network net... 

The power systems’ net-load variability and uncertainty would aggravate significantly as the penetration of Renewable Energy Resources (RERs) in power systems increases. In response, power system researchers have introduced a new concept, namely flexibility, to quantitatively and systematically deal with unavoidable features of RERs. In power distribution systems as the connection point of power systems with customers, there are many opportunities for improving the flexibility level of systems. Nowadays, the emergence of prosumers has created new opportunities for distribution system operators in providing the system with different services of flexibility in distribution systems. Therefore,... 

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are widely used as a promising machine learning method in different applications and come with intensive computation and storage requirements. In recent years, several pieces of prior work have proposed different accelerators to improve DNNs processing. We observe that although the state-of-the-art DNN accelerators effectively process some network layers of certain shapes, they fail to keep computation resources fully utilized for many other layers. The reason is twofold: first, the mapping algorithm is unable to employ all compute cores for processing some layer types and dimension sizes, and second, the hardware cannot perform data distribution and aggregation... 

Personalized advertising has grown drastically as new tracking technologies allow advertisers to monitor consumers’ online behavior and distribute advertisements accordingly, which has given rise to privacy concerns. The present study investigates the role of personality traits and data source in social media behavioral advertising’s value perception. Two online studies were conducted to examine how plasticity (shared variance of openness and extraversion) and data source (first party vs third-party) affect consumers’ privacy calculus and purchase intention respectively. The participants, all active social media users from the United States, were hired from Prolific.co. For the first study,... 

Nowadays, variable generation and renewable energy resources are increasingly penetrating the energy systems to supply the users' demand at the distribution grid. Variable Energy Resources (VER) can provide energy at a lower cost, and they also guarantee cleaner energy. Still, the uncertainty and variability from these resources' output can affect the net-load of the system at each hour. Besides, the issue of energy balance has always been a challenge for the energy distribution networks. A comprehensive way to unravel this problem is to use flexible resources. One of the crucial issues in the flexibility debate is meeting this need by different energy resources. It is always an issue for... 

In this research, room-temperature flexible humidity sensors using graphene oxide (GO) and partially reduced grapheme oxide (PRGO) are reported. Sensing layer was deposited onto Kapton substrate by spin coating method. Topography of the sensing layer was observed by Optical Microscopy, Atomic Force Microscopy (AFM) and Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM). Partial reduction of the GO was confirmed by X-ray Diffraction (XRD) data. Humidity sensing properties of the samples that were annealed in different temperatures in the range of 125-200 were measured at room temperature. The sample which was reduced at 125 presented higher response about 106% and shorter recovery time of about 65 s.... 

The main focus of this project is the fabrication of surface engineering scaffolds based on polyurethane and titanium dioxide. The research's aim is the creation of the synergistic properties of TiO2 and PU as a new strategy for engineering artificial autologous blood vessels. In the first section, PU-TiO2 nanocomposites were synthesized by co-insitu synthesis of nanoparticles and polymer. The nanocomposite films were prepared by solvent casting and thermally induced phase separation methods. Mechanical and biological properties of films were compared with pure PU film. In solvent casting method, the outcomes revealed that the rate of endothelialization of the nanocomposite scaffold after 7... 

One of the challenges which increasing penetration of renewable energy sources with variable generation brings is the need for more flexibility in the power system. A promising way to overcome the challenge is to have local sources of the flexibility in distribution level. To this end, we present a new model for multi-stage distribution system expansion planning which jointly considers expanding the network assets and increasing the flexibility at local level by installing conventional dispatchable distributed generator units and energy storage systems. Demand response is also considered as another source of the flexibility which can be utilized by the system operator. Since deviating from... 

In the first part of this research, for the first time, we introduced a flexible high performance graphene-based supercapacitor using silver fiber fabric as the current collector. The silver fiber fabric offers remarkable advantages such as light weight, mechanical flexibility and ease of integration with electronic textiles, which well-suited for wearable energy storage devices. A new hybrid material of graphene-silver fiber fabric (rGO/SFF) was prepared through a facile electrophoretic deposition of graphene and being used as a binder-free flexible supercapacitor electrode. In order to obtain the optimum condition, the effect of deposition time was investigated and a duration time of 10...