Sharif Digital Repository

Underground pipelines are important infrastructure for transporting energy resources, particularly water and oil. Due to the high risk of damage and possible consequences, close monitoring of pipelines is a serious challenge for researchers and decision makers. Piezoelectric sensors/actuators are being used to monitor the physical characteristics of pipelines, including corrosion and crack. Piezoelectric ceramics as transmitters and/or receivers are connected to data concentrators in order to monitor the defects in pipelines. The performance and accuracy of this system highly depends on the accurate interpretation of the received electrical signals due to changing mechanical fields. However,... 

This paper will first describe the Linear Quadratic Regulator (LQR) and Fuzzy logic controller when the Proportional-Integral-Derivative (PID) controllers are inactive for procedures that have large delay time (LDT) in transfer stage. Therefore in those states, LQR and Fuzzy controllers perform better than the PID controllers. The constrained LQR is optimal and stabilizing. The solution algorithm is guaranteed to terminate in finite time with a computational cost that has a reasonable upper bound compared to the minimal cost for computing the optimal solution. The system determines the amount of fuel required from a fuzzy algorithm to arrive at the desired temperature. The parameters of the... 

The solubility of hydrogen sulfide in a series of 1-(2-hydroxyethyl)-3-methylimidazolium ([HOemim]+)-based ionic liquids (ILs) containing different anions, viz. hexafluorophosphate ([PF6]-), trifluoromethanesulfonate ([OTf]-), and bis-(trifluoromethyl)sulfonylimide ([Tf2N]-) at temperatures ranging from 303.15 to 353.15K and pressures of up to about 1.8MPa was measured by a volumetric based static apparatus. The solubility data were correlated using two models: (1) the Krichevsky-Kasarnovsky equation and (2) the extended Henry's law combined with the Pitzer's virial expansion for the excess Gibbs energy. Henry's law constants (at zero pressure) in mole-fraction and molality scales were... 

The emergence of mobile IoT applications in recent years and the challenge of routing in their infrastructures have motivated scholars to propose appropriate routing mechanisms for such systems. Meanwhile, the IPv6 Routing Protocol for Low Power and Lossy Networks (RPL) is the standard routing protocol for IoT infrastructures. Nevertheless, RPL was mainly designed to comply with the primitive requirements of static IoT applications and it behaves poorly in confronting with the severe alterations in mobile conditions. The most important factor for such a poor behavior in mobile applications is the inappropriate design of OFs, which determine RPL's routing policies in the network. Therefore,... 

Mobile networks have been growing rapidly, where it is of paramount importance to evaluate the performance of any protocol designed for such networks before deployment. Mobility is one of the main mobile network issues that directly affects performance metrics. Since mobile nodes are often carried by their owners, nodes movement should be modeled according to humans movement. In this paper, we extend our previously published human mobility model based on real collected data. The real human movement is traced, cleaned up and analyzed. To the best of our knowledge, our collected data set is the only one that contains the detail of both walking and driving nodes. The analysis shows several... 

As computer simulation increasingly supports engineering design, the requirement for a computer software environment providing an integration platform for computational engineering software increases. A key component of an integrated environment is the use of computational engineering to assist and support solutions for complex design. In the present paper, an integrated software environment is demonstrated for multi-disciplinary computational modeling of structural and geotechnical problems. The SUT-DAM is designed in both popularity and functionality with the development of user-friendly pre- and post-processing software. Pre-processing software is used to create the model, generate an... 

Web search engines play a significant role in answering users’ information needs based on the huge amount of data available on the internet. Although evaluating the performance of these systems is very important for their improvement, there is no comprehensive, unbiased, low-cost, and reusable method for this purpose. Previous works used a small and limited set of queries for their evaluation process that restricts the assessment domain. Moreover, these methods mainly rely on human evaluators for manual assessment of search engines which makes the results of the evaluation subjective to the opinion of human evaluators and also prone to error. In addition, repeating the evaluation would be a... 

This paper presents a broad-band bandpass filter (BPF) designed as a channel-select filter for wireless applications. It is implemented as a low-pass filter (LPF) in series with a high-pass filter (HPF) for lower power consumption compared to true BPF. Semiscaling of the filter nodes is superior in the wireless receiver over traditional full scaling. The HPF is built with low-pass feedback of an amplifier. The bandwidth is selectable from 625 kHz, 2.5 MHz, or 10 MHz. The filter stopband loss is more than 50 dB extending beyond 100 MHz, and passband ripple less than 2.5 dB. Fabricated in a 0.6-μm CMOS process, it provides a minimum input noise of 16 nV/√Hz noise with 22.5-dBm out-of-band... 

A lubrication model is used to study dewetting of an evaporating thin film layer over a solid substrate with a nanometer-scale topography. The effects of the geometry of the topography, the contact angle, the film thickness, and the slippage on the dewetting have been studied. Our results reveal that the evaporation enhances the dewetting process and reduces the depinning time over the topography. Also it is shown that the depinning time is inversely proportional to the slippage and increasing the contact angle may considerably reduce the depinning time, while the film thickness increases the depinning time  

This paper presents a new approach based on multi leader follower game in order to find the optimal contract price of distributed generation in distribution network considering competition among them. The leader problems correspond to the independent DG units who decide to maximize the individual profits, while the follower problem refers to the distribution company (DisCo) which seeks the minimization of the payments incurred in attending the expected demand while satisfying network constraints. Disco can purchase energy either from the transmission network through the substations or from the DG units within its network. The DisCo minimization problem acts as a constraint into the each DG... 

Traditionally, the model of a resource-constrained project-scheduling problem (RCPSP) contains a single objective function of either minimizing project makespan or maximizing project net present value (NPV). In order to be more realistic, in this paper, two multi-objective meta-heuristic algorithms of multi-population and two-phase sub-population genetic algorithms are proposed to find Pareto front solutions that minimize the project makespan and maximize the project NPV of a RCPSP, simultaneously. Based on standard test problems constructed by the RanGen project generator, a comprehensive computational experiment is performed, where response surface methodology is employed to tune the... 

In this paper, we will propose a new methodology for performance modeling of IEEE 802.11p medium access control (MAC) sub-layer in broadcast mode. In most of the current works, it is assumed that the number of contending nodes is deterministic and constant. However, in vehicular ad hoc networks, we can observe a kind of uncertainty in number of contending vehicles, which try to get access to the shared wireless channel. This uncertainty can affect the performance analysis of MAC protocols in vehicular environments. In this paper, we will try to model the dynamicity of number of contending vehicles based on the distribution of vehicles' velocity. This model will be combined with the current... 

The construction of a facies model could be employed as a conditional data for any property simulation that results in a more reliable reservoir characterization in further steps. In this study, an Iranian gas reservoir with six wells was studied to determine the 3D reservoir facies model. Fifteen reservoir facies were first detected along one of the wells with detailed core and thin section descriptions. Due to the significant difference between the core and log data resolution, facies were clustered into four major groups regarding the digenetic processes and petrophysical lithofacies properties (permeability and porosity). The lithofacies specification effect on petrophysical properties... 

The advancement in technology, information and communication has forced banks and financial institutions into hard competition. In this new era technology, people and customer are the elements which the banks are concentrating on them to manage customer relationship and success of banking in customer satisfaction. Electronic customer relationship management (e-CRM) is seen to arise from the consolidation of traditional CRM with the e-business applications marketplace and has created a flurry of activity among companies. The purpose of this study is to examine the competitive advantages on e-CRM in financial institutions and banks and obtain better understanding of the e-CRM benefits. A... 

Joining of yttria-stabilized zirconia (YSZ) to stainless steels is considered for various applications such as solid oxide fuel cells, thermal barrier coatings, and medical implants. In the present work, a series of brazing pastes utilizing silver and nickel nanoparticles (∼80 nm) mixed with carboxymethyl cellulose as the organic phase were developed to join 5 mol% YSZ to AISI 420 steel. Effects of processing parameters including time and temperature of brazing and the composition of the nanopastes on the microstructure of joints and their shear rupture strength were studied. Elaboration of the joining mechanism by scanning electron microscopy and electron probe micro-analyzer showed... 

The In this paper, an Adaptive Particle Swarm Optimization (APSO) method is proposed for parameter identification of highly coupled electromechanical systems. Using some modifications on the APSO, better computational efficiency is achieved. In this way, the speed of real-time identification procedure is improved. In addition, to show the effectiveness of the proposed method, it is implemented on a real ball on plate setup and its dynamic model is achieved. Both the simulation and the experimental results show that parameter identification of the proposed algorithm is significantly improved when compared with other existing identification methods based on the traditional PSO and Genetic... 

Leak detection based on acoustic emission needs robust time delay estimation in the presence of various types of noise. Considering several aspects of leakage signal and noise, the present work introduces wavelet based optimized residual complexity (WORC), in order to minimize the probability of false alarms in the presence of correlated, uncorrelated, and impulsive noise. The proposed method utilizes two approaches simultaneously. First, it optimizes residual complexity “for robustness against both correlated and uncorrelated noise”, then it employs wavelet basis in order to reduce the complexity of mixture of correlated and impulsive noise. In order to compare the resolution and percentage... 

In this paper, an innovative method is proposed for material selection. This method is based on the well-known weighting properties approach while integrating a new exponential function in the method to overcome the deficiencies of previously proposed methods. Using a maximum and minimum, in each significant aspect of the problem, for scaling, the values of material properties and achieving more realistic results by not emphasizing on any of the high and low extremes and using an exponential function that ranks the candidates regardless of their number, for improving the performance of the methodology and obtaining more absolute rankings, are some of the advantages of this method. The... 

Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) for Mobile Ad hoc NETworks (MANETs) are necessary when they are deployed in reality. In This paper, we have presented a combined method of selecting IDS agent nodes in mobile ad hoc networks. Since, the IDS agents in MANET due to more activities need to more battery power. In our method, first, compromised nodes are detected and then the nodes with the highest energy power from among valid nodes as IDS agent nodes are considered. So, with this method, some valid nodes contribute in intrusion detection activities and costs of the network monitoring will be reduced and the network lifetime will be increased. © 2009 IEEE