Sharif Digital Repository

The aim of this study is developing and investigating heterogeneous catalysts based on natural calcite for the transesterification of canola oil and methanol in order to produce biodiesel as a renewable and alternative fuel for fossil fuels. At first calcite was calcined at high temperature to decompose calcium carbonate to calcium oxide. Afterward, Mg-Zr/CaO catalysts were prepared with mass ratio of 2:1 Mg:Zr and different weight percent(2.5, 5,7.5 and 10 wt%) on calcite supported by impregnation method. In order to characterized synthesized catalysts used different analysis such as energy dispersive X-ray (EDX) spectroscopy, powder X-ray diffraction (XRD), scanning electron microscopy... 

Mental models are a reflection of the individuals’ cognitive structure. In fact, these models are the conceptual frameworks that people form based on their experiences and knowledge. These models gives the individuals the ability to predict the results of an action and interpret their surroundings. In this cognitive-linguistic study, mental models are defined as concepts and the relationships between them in a particular context. Considering this definition of mental models, we could extract the mental models of two American presidents of opposing parties, Barack Obama and George W. Bush, from their speech transcriptions during their presidential periods and classify their concepts in to... 

Analog-to-digital conversion and signal processing has been increasing due to its many advantages. So that mostly we prefer to convert signal from analog area to digital samples, then they are processed and finaly put the result signal at the system output. How ever because the restriction of the sampling rate, Prevent the spread of digital processing for the high-frequency signal (RF). In recent years, ADCs sampling rate rise up to several GHz (for example ADC with 4 GSPS and 12 bits for TI) that output of the these ADCs by powerful and fast FPGAs are processed but According to Shannon theorem band width of these ADCs is not desirable.the goal of this thesis uses of the compressed sensing... 

Ice formation upon various surfaces could lead to many industry problems and result in unpleasant accidents. For instance, the formation of ice on wind turbine blades or airplanes/helicopter wings could cause catastrophic disasters. The methods used to address this problem usually require exogenous energy consumption or anti-ice ingredients. The energy or anti-ice ingredients usage has adverse environmental effects and should be replaced with better approaches. One of these approaches is utilizing modified anti-ice surfaces. In this method, by modifying surface features, such as physical asperities and surface energy, the icing time of the surface could be prolonged. These surfaces are... 

This dissertation deals with nonwandering (e.g. area-preserving) homeomorphisms of the torus which are homotopic to the identity and strictly toral, in the sense that they exhibit dynamical properties that are not present in homeomorphisms of the annulus or the plane. This includes all homeomorphisms which have a rotation set with nonempty interior. There are two types of points: inessential and essential. It is known that the set of inessential points Ine(f ) is a disjoint union of periodic topological disks ("elliptic islands"), while the set of essential points Ess(f ) is an essential continuum, with typically rich dynamics ("the chaotic region"). One of the key results in this context is... 

The multi-armed bandit problem is a popular model for studying exploration/exploitation trade-off in sequential decision problems. Many algorithms are now available for this well-studied problem. One of the earliest algorithms, given by W. R. Thompson, dates back to 1933. This algorithm,referred to as Thompson Sampling, is a natural Bayesian algorithm. The basic idea is to choose an arm to play according to its probability of being the best arm. Thompson Sampling algorithm has experimentally been shown to be close to optimal. In this dissertation several papers are being reviewed. In these papers it has been shown that Thompson Sampling algorithm achieves logarithmic expected regret for the... 

The Low salinity water flooding is one of the important methods of secondary and tertiary oil production in which many expert petroleum-production engineering working on it in recent two decades. There are some basis mechanisms for low salinity method presented in the literatures including fine migrations, alkaline flooding, multicomponent ionic exchange, electrical double-layer expansion and pH-driven wettability alteration. The main approach is generating low salinity mechanism especially wettability alteration in OpenPNM framework. OpenPNM is a python base framework developed by Jeff Gostick for porous media modeling. OpenPNM has paved the way for extracting pore network models (PNM) from...