Sharif Digital Repository

Physical separation methods, especially membrane technology, can be a good substitute for biological wastewater treatment, due to its simple constructions and operations. There are many papers and patents in this field. Membranes need to be cleaned periodically to be able to operate economically, and need to be replaced after a while. Several factors can influence the membrane cleaning procedure, including pressure of backwash, acid and base concentration, duration of forward washing, and duration of acid-base backwashing. In this study the effect of these parameters was investigated to find an optimum condition which could result in a good polyethersulphone (PES) membrane cleaning with less... 

The objective of this study is to develop a general finite element formulation associated with an incremental adaptive procedure which established for thermoviscoelastic stress analysis of orthotropic cylinders made of polymers. This paper concerned with development of a numerical algorithm for the solution of the quasistatic initial/boundary value problems involving the linear viscoelastic media with thermal and mechanical deformations. The viscoelastic constitutive equations, represented in an integral form and involving relaxation functions, are transformed into an incremental algebraic relation. An incremental relaxation is then developed for the finite element formulation to deal with... 

In this work, the process of starch removal from starchy wastewater using a hydrophilic polyethersulfone membrane was investigated. The pore size of the membrane was 0.65 μm and the pattern of stream in plate and frame handmade membrane module was cross-flow. To design the layout of the experiments, response surface methodology was applied. The performance of the filtration process was evaluated by calculating the (chemical oxygen demand) COD removal percentage (rejection factor) and permeate flux. In this study, five operative parameters were investigated, including trans-membrane pressure, flow rate and temperature of feed, pH, and the COD concentration of starch wastewater. Two models... 

In oil and gas fields, it is a common practice to flow liquid and gas mixtures through choke valves. In general, different types of primary valves are employed to control pressure and flow rate when the producing well directs the natural gas to the processing equipment. In this case, the valve normally is affected by elevated levels of flow (or velocity) as well as solid materials suspended in the gas phase (e.g., fine sand and other debris). Both surface and subsurface chokes may be installed to regulate flow rates and to protect the porous medium and surface facilities from unusual pressure instabilities.In this study a reliable, novel, computer based predictive model using Least-Squares... 

The bending performance of standard nanoplasmonic slot waveguides is substantially improved by reducing the leakage loss and reflection in a systematic way. The out-of-plane power leakage is suppressed by using square metallic patches above and below the bend. The in-plane power leakage is reduced by elimination of the asymmetry between the electrical length of the inner and outer corners of the bend. The unwanted reflection is decreased by changing the shape of the outer corner of the bend. The partial reflections caused by the indentations of the modified shape destructively interfere with each other and thereby decrease the unwanted back reflection  

A coupled transmission line model whose parameters are analytically given is provided for fast and accurate analysis of miscellaneous plasmonic structures with metal-dielectric-metal (MDM) arrangement. The coupling of surface plasmons supported by the planar metal-dielectric interfaces is included in the proposed model and thereby the effects of the first non-principal mode of the MDM waveguide are considered. In particular, MDM bends, junctions, and stubs are studied. Using rigorous numerical solutions, e.g., the finite-element method and the finite-difference time-domain, it is shown that the proposed model is accurate in all those cases  

A simple yet accurate model for the analysis of coupling between arrayed plasmonic slot cavities and bus/drop metal-dielectric-metal waveguides is presented. The evanescent coupling region is replaced by a transmission line section whose propagation constant and characteristic impedance are given in closed form. The side coupling between the bus waveguide and the slot cavity is modeled together with the direct coupling between the slot cavity and the drop channel. The proposed model is validated by using rigorous numerical method, and is used to design a typical demultiplexer  

Inherently safer design is the new approach to maximize the overall safety of a process plant. This approach suggests some risk reduction strategies to be implemented in the early stages of design. In this paper a multi-objective optimization was performed considering economic, exergetic, and environmental aspects besides evaluation of the inherent safety level of a cascade refrigeration system. The capital costs, the processing costs, and the social cost due to CO2 emission were considered to be included in the economic objective function. Exergetic efficiency of the plant was considered as the second objective function. As a measure of inherent safety level, Quantitative Risk Assessment... 

Shear connectors are essential elements in the design of steel-concrete composite systems. These connectors are utilized to prevent the occurrence of potential slips at the interface of steel and concrete. The two types of shear connectors which have been recently employed in construction projects are C- and L-shaped connectors. In the current study, the behavior of C and L-shaped angle shear connectors is investigated experimentally. For this purpose, eight push-out tests were composed and subjected to monotonic loading. The load-slip curves and failure modes have been determined. Also, the shear strength of the connectors has been compared with previously developed relationships. Two... 

Chiral recognition has long been a challenging issue to deal with in biological systems, drug design and food authentication. Implementing nanoparticle-based probes with intrinsic or induced chirality in this field has addressed several issues concerning sensitivity, reliability, rapidness and the cost of chiral sensing platforms. Yet, research into chiral nanoprobes that can be used for visual monitoring of chiral substances is still in its infancy. As part of this study, a visual chiral recognition platform has been developed in which a combination of blue-emitting carbon dots (BCDs) and mercaptopropionic acid-capped CdTe quantum dots (MPA-QDs) with inherent chiroptical activity were... 

One of the most promising methods for transporting natural gas and overcoming its low energy density is adsorbed natural gas (ANG) technology. ANG technology is highly dependent on the perfect conception of adsorption isotherms in different operational conditions and on different adsorbents. In this study, the utilization of a novel mathematical model of least squares support vector machine (LSSVM) for accurate prediction of adsorption isotherm has been examined. The considered variables were temperature, pressure and type of adsorbents. A data set containing 670 experimental data points of methane adsorption on 10 different adsorbents in a broad range of temperature and pressure were used... 

This paper presents artificial neural network (ANN) meta-models for expensive continuous simulation optimization (SO) with stochastic constraints. These meta-models are used within a sequential experimental design to approximate the objective function and the stochastic constraints. To capture the non-linear nature of the ANN, the SO problem is iteratively approximated via non-linear programming problems whose (near) optimal solutions obtain estimates of the global optima. Following the optimization step, a cutting plane-relaxation scheme is invoked to drop uninformative estimates of the global optima from the experimental design. This approximation is iterated until a terminating condition... 

In this paper, a new algorithm for solving constrained nonlinear programming problems is presented. The basis of our proposed algorithm is none other than the necessary and sufficient conditions that one deals within a discrete constrained local optimum in the context of the discrete Lagrange multipliers theory. We adopt a revised particle swarm optimization algorithm and extend it toward solving nonlinear programming problems with continuous decision variables. To measure the merits of our algorithm, we provide numerical experiments for several renowned benchmark problems and compare the outcome against the best results reported in the literature. The empirical assessments demonstrate that... 

Although simple additive weighting method (SAW) is the most popular approach for classical multiple attribute decision making (MADM), it is not practical any more if information is fuzzy. The existing methods of Fuzzy Simple Additive Weighting method (FSAW) apply defuzzification which distorts fuzzy numbers. Furthermore, most of the methods usually require lengthy and laborious manipulations. In this paper, we develop a new a fuzzy simple additive weighting method for multiple attribute decision making problems. To avoid defuzzification round off errors caused by multiplication or other arithmetic manipulations, fuzzy numbers are ranked prior to any fuzzy arithmetic in this method. The... 

We propose a ranking method for fuzzy numbers. In this method a preference function is defined by which fuzzy numbers are measured point by point and at each point the most preferred number is identified. Then, these numbers are ranked on the basis of their preference ratio. Therefore, fuzzy numbers are compared relatively and not necessarily one is preferred absolutely over the others. This method is especially designed to evaluate alternatives in multi criteria or multi-attribute decision making. The method is intuitive and can be used to discriminate between numbers easily. The method is specially tailored for triangular fuzzy numbers (TFN) and an algorithm is presented to determine the... 

An easy-to-design single-stub nano-coupler is proposed to increase the direct coupling efficiency between metal-insulator-metal (MIM) plasmonic and high-index dielectric waveguides. The modal reflection and transmission from the junction are exploited to provide a circuit description for the structure. The return loss of direct coupling is then minimized by loading the MIM waveguide with a single stub. Numerical examples are given, and the accuracy of the model is examined via finite-difference time-domain method