Sharif Digital Repository

Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) are currently attracting the attention of researchers around the world. They offer a wide range of applications improving road safety and driving comfort. Since VANET applications affect safety-of-life, data security in a vehicular system is mandatory. VANET is a special case of Mobile Ad hoc Network (MANET). Routing in VANET is a controversial issue. Furthermore, Security at routing level is so important because if the routing is compromised, other protocol layers on top of the network layer are also compromised. In this thesis, DSDV, DSR and AODV routing protocols are simulated to understand which of these protocols are suitable for VANET. Finding... 

The problem of restoring power systems after a complete or partial blackout is as old as the power industry itself. In recent years, due to economic competition and deregulation, power systems are operated closer and closer to their limits. At the same time, power systems have increased in size and complexity. Both factors increase the risk of major power outages. After a blackout, power needs to be restored as quickly and reliably as possible, and consequently, detailed restoration plants are necessary. This thesis concentrates on the initial stages of restoration where load pickup and frequency control problem is identified. The best sequence of load pickup for power plants during power... 

It is several decades that the effect of soil-structure interaction (SSI) has been known to engineers. Many methods have been developed to estimate this effect, but modal analysis of soil-structure systems is one of the most popular techniques due to its simplicity and better insight. Due to this reasons, modal analysis found its place in codes and provisions such as NEHRP. Presence of soil beneath the structure not only would alter the natural periods and damping ratio of structure but also would impose some new vibration modes to the system due to soil’s degrees of freedom. Consequently, response of structure is a combination of the effects of all these modes. But, in practice,... 

Traditional security approaches prevented participants of an environment from malicious behavior by closely monitoring every transaction of the network. Such approaches are very costly in modern autonomous systems, besides, they are also impossible to apply in many cases. Trust management mechanisms are developed in order to ensure safe interactions with unknown parties in such open environments. Most trust management mechanisms rely on testimonies of interaction participants as the source of information to estimate a peer’s reputation. The first challenge that arises here is the lack of incentives for providing such information. Even if interaction parties are encouraged to report the... 

Since robustness of peer-to-peer networks depends heavily on voluntary resource sharing among individual peers, the intrinsic problem of free riding exists among autonomous rational peers that consume resources of others without contributing anything in return. One solution to the free riding problem in peer to peer networks is to have incentive mechanisms that aim to improve network efficiency by encouraging peers to cooperate. In this project, we have proposed a hybrid double-auction-based incentive mechanism for centralized peer-to-peer file sharing systems. In addition, a cryptography-based trust management scheme has been proposed to prevent peers from sending fake data. We have... 

Increasing energy demand and at the same time, considering exhaustible fossil fuel resources has led to increase distributed generation for reducing energy loss and increasing efficiency of energy systems specially due to technical development on generation systems that meet environmental and energy policy concerns. One of the most important distributed energy technologies is Combined Heat and Power (CHP). CHP is small, high efficiency, low installation time and self-contained electric generation plant that can provide power for household applications, commercial or industrial facilities and hence its applications are overtly increasing. It can reduce power loss and enhance service... 

Speech enhancement in noisy environments improves the quality and intelligibility of speech and reduces communication fatigue. High performance speech enhancement models are based on Bayesian estimation models, requiring estimations of the parameters of the functions that describe the likelihood and the prior distributions of the signal and noise processes. Two Bayesian speech enhancement models which are used in this thesis are Bayesian-Kalman filter and Bayesian MAP estimation.In real time applications including VoIP, in addition to additive noise, packet loss or packet delays might also occur. In real time communications the receiver terminal replaces silence for the duration of lost... 

Load frequency control (LFC) is one of the important control problems in interconnected power system design and operation, and is becoming more significant today because of the increasing size, changing structure, emerging new uncertainties, environmental constraints and the omplexity of power systems. Therefore, load frequency function requires increased performance and flexibility to ensure that it is capable of maintaining a generation-load balance, following serious disturbances.Real power systems are often large-scale systems which are composed of many interacting subsystems. Therefore, it is difficult to control such systems due to the required inherent computational complexities and... 

The effect of soil structure interaction, on displacement modification factor in constant reduction factors (CR) is evaluated, studied for SDOF structures placed on flexible base modeled by 3DOF system as the base foundation (a sway, a rocking and an internal degree of freedom to see the frequency dependency of dynamic stiffness of soil). 60 records of FEMA-440 for 3 types of soils (B, C and D) are analyzed for 28 different soil-structure conditions, 6 different level of reduction factors, and varied secondary hardening for 2 different hysteresis behavior to see the effect of stiffness hardening. Results are plotted in spectrums to see the role of Tn.
Final results show that effect of... 

Motion dynamics of cat species has always been attractive to be studied. Flexibility in motion due to specific skeleton and complex muscle-skeleton mechanism, control concepts, special way of running, high speed direction change while moving, ability of twisting the body during free fall, and landing on four limbs were widely investigated in literature and the results have been used in different branches such as control, robotics and aerospace.In this project, kinematic and dynamic equations of cat species falling maneuver are derived using quaternions for a simple two-link robot, a three-link robot with tail, and a more complete eight-link model with the addition of legs which is designed... 

In recent decades, the usage of robots in industrial applications increased dramatically. One group of robots are manipulators which they are used in production lines for moving parts, cutting, welding, …. In these applications, different control methods are used to control the end effector of manipulators precisely. From one aspect, control methods are divided to two parts: A) The methods that do not need to equation of motion of robot, such as proportional-integral-derivative method. B) The methods that are designed based on equation of motion of robot. To use these methods, first the equation of motion of manipulator should be calculated according to its structure. These equations are... 

Liquefaction is one of the probable consequences of earthquake in soil layers of saturated loose sands. Various aspects of liquefaction have been investigated using different methods of field, laboratory, and numerical studies. Numerical simulation of liquefaction constitutes a major part of these researches. A proper constitutive law must be implemented in the numerical analysis for modeling the complicated behavior of saturated sands during dynamic loading. Simplicity of formulation, limited number of parameters and good performance are the main features of a proper constitutive law. In this study, Endochronic model for simulating liquefaction has been introduced. This model is implemented... 

Dynamic characteristics of structures—viz., natural frequencies, damping ratios, and mode shapes—are central to earthquake resistant design (model validation) and health monitoring. For civil structures like buildings and bridges, these characteristics can be highly influenced by surrounding soil in addition to the super-structure’s properties and cannot be correctly estimated using numerical modeling. For example, soil’s flexibility decreases the natural frequencies of the system; and in most cases, soil provides additional damping due to material hysteresis and radiation. On account of this fact, system identification techniques must be applied to extract such information from field data,... 

The pressurized structure such as aircraft fuselage and pipeline (in the oil and water transportation) have a great importance in today’s world. There is a growing tendency in improving design factors, safety and maintenance of such valuable structures. Change of design’s philosophy during the time from infinite life to safe damage and safe life and after that damage tolerance, are a process leading to many changes in design and consequently the methods of inspection, evaluation and maintenance. In this way, using old methods like non-destructive test and evaluation (NDT/E) is encountered with different problems when damage is tiny and there is no coincidence in examination (inspection)... 

Usually the structures are designed based on the fixed-base assumption; however thisassumption is not always correct and the bed flexibility should be considered. This effectwhich is called soil-structure interaction, change the response of structure on both elasticand inelastic behavior. In the regulations for the design of structures on flexible base,generally soil-structure system is replaced with an equivalent fixed base structure; in theway that the design force of soil-structure system with reasonable accuracy can beestimated by equivalent fixed-base structure. In some regulations, dynamic characteristicsof equivalent structure have been determined on elastic state and the results have... 

In this thesis, turbine disk thermo elastic and creep stresses has been extracted and the turbine disk cross-section is optimized. Gas turbine disks are used at high temperature and high rotational speed. Due to high temperatures gradients, the mechanical properties vary along the radius of the disk. Most of the stresses in the gas turbine are exerted by centrifugal force and thermal strains. At first, thermo elastic and creep equations for these disks are derived, assuming plane stress and axisymmetry. The resulting differential equations are nonlinear and can not be solved using analytical solutions. Two methods are used to solve the equations which finally are verified employing the... 

The objective of this thesis is to develop a speech enhancement technique that can be applied for enhancement of speech degraded by additive background noise. The important aim of speech enhancement is to get better result after transmission at the receiver side. Additive noise such as White Gaussian Noise, Street Noise, Babble Noise, etc, is one of the speech enhancement problems degrading the intelligibility and quality of the signal. The important applications for speech enhancement are VOIP, Telephone services, mobile telephony, hands free voice control, communication between pilot cockpit, etc. Wiener filters are the mostly used techniques to reduce the uncorrelated additive noise with... 

Nowadays the growing demand for energy, and, on the other hand, the limited resources of fossil consuming energy in the world have caused the energy operation and consumption management to be taken into consideration much more than the past. Based on this background, improving the efficiency of feed conversion technologies in supplying the energy demanded by the consumers is the foremost and the most crucial solution to preventing energy loss. Another approach to reducing the losses through energy generation and transmission is the use of distributed energy generation systems in small scale. The advantages of applying this type of technology are the possibility of installing near the load... 

Low-frequency oscillation damping in power system is main determinants of the stability of the system. According to increasing of wind farms with high penetration levels in the power system, participation and control of wind farms for increase damping inter area oscillations seems important. In this study a damping controller suggested for Doubly Fed Induction Generator (DFIG). Using this controller and only available local signal as input controller and combination of both active and reactive power modulation, can greatly increase damping inter area oscillations and stability of uncertainty and different working points. Using linear analysis system, identified modes oscillating system and... 

Location observations from Global Positioning System (GPS) loggers are an important source of data for travel behavior researchers. Using GPS, requires a receiver, a digital map and a software that matches the user logged positions to the map. Identifying the location of the GPS data points on a coded map of the transportation network is not a trivial process. There is always an error in calculating the coordinates obtained from the GPS satellites, and also the available maps are not accurate enough. As a result, map-matching always carries some errors. Thus, different algorithms to do this mapping more precisely are presented. The output of the map-matching process is the identification of...