Sharif Digital Repository

One of the crucial ways to reduce the energy costs of buildings is to improve the energy efficiency of HVAC systems. Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning (HVAC) refer to the systems used to adjust the heating and cooling within a building. Control of these systems has great importance due to their excessive energy usage. Various control methods have shown a potential for considerable savings in building operation costs. In this research, a Model Predictive Controller (MPC) is applied to perform optimal control actions. MPC opens up numerous opportunities to improve energy efficiency in the operation of HVAC systems because of their capability to consider constraints, prediction of... 

In recent years, great attention has been devoted to the design of artificial arms. The most crucial problem in such a design is the trajectory of movement. In this paper, a seven degree of freedom arm is modeled and simulated. Also, the optimization method named “Imperialistic Competitive Algorithm” has been modified and better performance of the new version is presented. Energy optimization is performed based on trajectory of the arm with angular velocity, angular acceleration and joint angles using modified imperialistic competitive algorithm (ICA). Considering ICA as a fast optimization algorithm, it would be reasonable to use this algorithm for robotic purposes for online answering. The... 

Sparse signal representations and its applications has been a hot topic of research in recent years. It has been demonstrated that sparsity prior can be effectively used as a regularization term to solve many of the inverse problems. One of these problems in which sparse representations have been used is image super-resolution (SR). SR is the problem of finding a high resolution (HR) image from one or several low resolution (LR) images. In this dissertation, we have focused on the problem of finding a HR image from only one LR image which is known as example-based SR. There are two kinds of methods for example-based SR: the methods which use neighborhood embedding and the methods which use... 

Nowadays, Machine learning algorithms are used to perform different tasks. Due to the high computational complexity of machine learning methods especially deep learning methods, running these methods efficiently on resource-constrained applications such as the Internet of Things (IoT) is challenging. To address the mentioned limitation, many devices send the raw data to the edge or cloud for classification due to limited computational power. This brings security and privacy issues and increases computational latency and network traffic. Hardware accelerators can be used to overcome this challenge by improving the computational power of the end nodes. Power and energy consumption with... 

Tehran is one of the most polluted megacities in the world, and based on different studies, vehicular sources are responsible for most of the criteria pollutant emissions in this city. The number of vehicles on the streets has been increased drastically leading to growing amount of emission and this trend is continuing. In order to reduce the amount of vehicular emission, it is vital to investigate the factors affecting vehicles emission in this city. This could help to find efficient solutions to improve the situation. Hence, a low-cost methodology to estimate the vehicular emissions is developed. In this... 

Most of local thinkers ,who were influenced by Western philosophers of science, and have spoken about religious knowledge, have selected experimental science as standard science and Have tried to find a way trough cultural and other non-scientific channels of science to influence the field of human knowledge by religious teaching's .This expert's are generally opposed to positivist’s models of science, but because of the nature of the Western atmosphere that they breathe, consider the experimental science as the main model of knowledge and the experience as the main method of Acquisition of knowledge. Paya is also one of this thinkers who is influenced by Karl Popper's ideas about the... 

Traffic accidents are one of the leading causes of death in the world. During the last decade driver distraction played a significant role in occurrence of road crashes. Since the issue is becoming a widespread concern in many countries, the main objective of the present study was to investigate the influence of driver distraction on the various aspects of traffic accidents. In this regard, the data source of reported crashes of the United States of America in year 2010 is used. Three main property of crashes including severity, type, and avoidance maneuver are studied. Analysis of accidents severity by generalized ordered logit model indicated that phone usage and in-vehicle distraction... 

Homo-polymer of Polypropylene is a commodity thermoplastic with good physical and mechanical properties along with fair recyclability and cost. However, its application is limited in some cases, especially in automotive industry, due to a lack of toughness. One of the approaches for PP toughening is the copolymerization of PP with some ethylene co-monomers. However, existence of elastomers in this kind of polymers causes a decrease in tensile properties. Besides, glass fibers improve tensile properties of homo-and co-PP and decrease toughness of co-polymers but result in an increase for homo-polymers. A rise in expenditure of energy due to increasing the processing temperature and... 

The axisymmetric contact problem of a rigid inclusion embedded in the piezoelectric biomaterial frictionless interface subjected to simultaneous far-field compression and electric displacement is addressed. With the aid of a robust technique, the coupled governing integral equations of this mixed boundary-value problem are reduced to decoupled Fredholm integral equations with a constraint equation. A useful limiting case for the contact problem of transversely isotropic bimaterials is addressed. The present solution is analytically in agreement with the existing solution for an isotropic bimaterial. Selected numerical results of interest to engineering applications including the radius of... 

The present paper proposes a micromechanical damage model for two and three dimensional Representative Volume Element (RVE) with randomly distributed cohesive rough slit-like and penny-shaped micro cracks (Barenblatt-Dugdale type). First, the influence of crack roughness on the crack opening under macro hydrostatic stress state is studied and then the energy release contribution to material damage process is estimated. Considering the fractality of the crack trajectories yields to lower values of the volume crack opening. This will result in lower energy release rate in RVE and higher levels of material resistance. Based on the energy release rate of RVE, the effective material properties... 

In recent years, because of power system restructuring and load growth, much of transmission lines are reaching to their maximum capacity. Therefore, it is so essential to upgrade existing transmission system. However, constructing new lines is a very expensive and time consuming method. Dynamic thermal rating of overhead line is an alternative solution for upgrading transmission system capacity. In this method, allowable current capability of line in the next duration is calculated according to the environmental conditions. A method should be developed to perfectly model these environmental changes. Fuzzy method is a powerful tool that models uncertainties and measurement errors in a simple... 

Causation is one of the most old and difficult problems of Metaphysics which is also important in Science and Philosophy of Science. There are three different views in the Ontology of Causation—Eliminativism, Fundamentalism and Reductionism. Also we know that the Ontology of Causation can be equated with the question of the difference between Causal and Non-Causal series of events, such that the answers to this question are correspondent to the mentioned views: 1)Eliminativism: There is not any difference between those two series and the concept of Causation does not have any objective or external being. 2)Primitivism: There is a difference between them but it can not be explained in any... 

In this thesis, first, random lasing in a three dimensional disordered medium has been simulated using FDTD method and some properties of random lasers which were observed by others in the previous experiments have theoretically been shown. Our simulation results show that when the density of particles increases to an upper limit, the intensity of lasing modes is enhanced. Also, the effects of pumping rate and particle size on the number of lasing modes and their intensity are studied. Lasing threshold of laser modes in different disordered systems is calculated and it is shown that by an appropriate selection of the central frequency of gain line-shape, the output power intensity of random... 

Our surrounding environment is full of particles with different sizes. These suspended particles enter our body through respiration process, which of course has some negative effects. Therefore, it is very important to comprehend the mechanisms and the effective parameters on these particles motion and their deposition inside the human airway. This work numerically investigates the effects of particles mass and breathing frequency on the deposition of particles in human respiratory system. To this end, a realistic 3-D model of human respiratory system geometry, including nostrils, vestibule, nasal cavity, human sinuses, nasopharynx, oropharynx, larynx, trachea, and main bronchus has been... 

In this study, Aluminium based nanocomposite with Al3Ti and Al2O3 nanoparticles have been elaborated by mechanical alloying. For this purpose, Al and TiO2 powders have been blended with weight ratios of 10, 20 and 30 percents and were milled using a planetary mill. Morphological variations in different timing periods of mechanical milling process was investigated by Scaning Electron Microscopy (SEM) and The optimal times for alloying were determined for each combination. The pure Aluminium and the powder with 10, 20 and 30%wt reinforcement had coax morphology after respectively for 44, 30, 24 and 14 hours. after studing phase transformations by XRD analysis, the final powders were cold...