Sharif Digital Repository

Electrochemical water splitting which consists of two half-reactions, namely; the hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) and the oxygen evolution reaction (OER), is an important process in electrochemical energy storage and sustainable production of energy. Therefore, the development of cost-effective and efficient electrocatalysts for water splitting has attracted a lot of interest. In this work, a new nanocomposite was prepared from cobalt diselenide and cerium (IV) oxide derived from calcination of a cerium-based metal-organic framework (Ce-MOF), via hydrothermal and electrodeposition methods. The structure and morphology of synthesized materials were investigated by XRD, FE-SEM, EDX, and BET... 

The continual deterioration and insufficient strength of reinforced concrete (RC) structures has been a vital problem in the field of civil engineering such an extent that traditional methods of strengthening found to be inconvenient. Nowadays by increasing demands for retrofitting of structures, it necessitates the application of efficient, inexpensive and unobtrusive methods of strengthening. Common way on retrofitting was to use of steel plates externally bonded to RC members. Although this technique has proven to be reasonably effective, it has several distinct disadvantages such as susceptibility of the steel plates to corrode and the excessive weight of steel plates when used in... 

The release of toxic materials causes tragic accidents every year. There are various techniques in order to mitigate the release effect of these materials such as Application of air jets, steam curtains and water curtains. In this study first, previous works are reviewed in order to select the best technique for the mitigation of heavy toxic gas release. Then CFD modeling is used to simulate this technique.
A field situation in which chlorine gas was released upwind of water spray was simulated using the open-source software FDS (Fire Dynamic Simulator), a CFD model. Only mechanical effects of water sprays are considered; hence the effect of absorbtion is neglected. Finally tha... 

Domino accidents are one types of incidents that lead to irreparable damage to industrial units. Since the consequences of such incidents are far more than the first level incident, consideration of this issue and the provision of appropriate strategies for identifying and evaluating this type of incident is very important. Major efforts have been made in the area of process safety is in risk assessment and identify possible scenarios and their probability of occurrence, and have not addressed the financial consequences of an incident. In this research, an algorithm has been developed to estimate the financial losses incurred with an industrial unit due to a domino incident and various... 

Gas detection systems are now recognized as an essential component of safety in process units.but their successful performance depends strongly on the number and location of the detectors.As for the limited resources available (detectors), the placement of gas detectors can be considered as an optimization problem with different objective functions. In this research, an attempt was made to provide models and methods that quantitatively and from a practical point of view to optimum locate the detectors. Initially, a risk-based method was presented that defines the necessary steps for the arrangement of fire gas detectors with the aim of covering the maximum risk of leakage scenarios (risk:... 

FRP confinement studies on concrete square columns and its effect on design and retrofitting has been the topic of numerous studies in recent years and due to wide spread usage of FRP in structural retrofitting, these studies are still carried out by researchers. One of the most common and accurate methods for predicting the behavior of structures is modeling by Finite Elements Method (FEM). This study aims to assess the effects of corner radius on axially loaded reinforced FRP-confined concrete columns and their behavior for different corner radiuses using FEM software. Using the capability of FEM in ABAQUS software (V 6.8-1), the behavior of square reinforced concrete (RC) columns... 

The release of toxic materials causes tragic accidents every year. There are various techniques in order to mitigate the release effect of these materials such as Application of air jets, steam curtains and water curtains. This study presents numerical calculations to reproduce the continuous ammonia release dispersion with and without the mitigating influence of a downwind water curtain using computational fluid dynamic (CFD) software ANSYS Fluent 15.0. The RNG model coupled with Lagrangian discrete phase model (DPM) was used to simulate the dilution effectiveness of the water curtain system. The ammonia absorption was taken into account by means of user-defined functions (UDF). The... 

In order to better understand the performance of the Iranian health insurance industry, household decisions to purchase private health insurance are analyzed using a two-stage (Heckman) model on Survey of Family Income and Expenditure data. Probit and OLS regressions are used to examine the factors influencing the probability and amount of private health insurance purchased. Generally, factors affecting the probability of having insurance also influence the amount of insurance coverage purchased. The results show the importance of some demographics on the insurance decision, particularly age, gender and marital status. Socio-economic factors such as education, income, employment sector,... 

Inherent safety means that the process is naturally safe and the conditions of occurrence of unsafe cases and situations are eliminated from the system so that unsafe conditions can be controlled and prevented from occurrence by means of layers of protection. In general, evaluation of inherent safety may be studied in two different conditions; the first one is associated with the units that are not completely designed and built yet. In the initial steps of developing a process, there is much freedom in the determination of materials, equipment, and designing variables. As soon as the process enters its life cycle, making changes in the process will be very difficult and expensive. Therefore,... 

Up to now, compared with the comprehensive research for developing robust watermarking algorithms, no equal attention has been devoted to the proposition of benchmarks tailored to assess the watermark robustness. In addition, almost all the state of the art benchmarks only integrate a number of common image processing operations like geometrical transformations to remove watermarks. However, the quality of the processed image is often too degraded to permit further commercial exploitation. Moreover, to the best of our knowledge, the design of these tools does not take into account the statistical properties of the images and watermarks in the design of attacks. In spite of the significant... 

The present study was aimed at investigating the relationship between reading comprehension ability as probably the most vital language skill especially in academic contexts (Farrell, 2009) and critical thinking as one of the most debated issues among scholars in modern education (Ku, 2009; Rudd, 2006). To this end, 200 male and female university students studying English Translation and Literature were chosen as the participants who sat for two tests. The first was a reading section of a retired TOEFL test provided by educational testing service in which the participants' scores were regarded as their reading comprehension ability. The second was the California Critical Thinking Skills... 

The environmental pollutions besides wasting the valuable materials as two main challenges in pyrometallurgical processes have brought up the tendency towards the hydrometallurgical processes. In the present study, the recovery of germanium from leaching residues of zinc plant has been investigated. Firstly, the required tests for concentrating the residues through washing of the zinc were designed by taguchi method, and optimum condition for maximum leaching of zinc accompanied by minimum desolution of germanium were obtained. The sulfuric acid concentration, time, termperature of reaction, solid to liquid ratio and rate of stirring are the parameters studied in this research. The obtained... 

Alborz-I array with 20 detectors will be established at Sharif University of Technology, to study Extensive Air Showers with energies around the knee of cosmic ray spectrum. In this thesis studies related to construction of this array is performed in two parts. First part is dedicated to evaluate detectors of Alborz-I array. Each detector consists of a plane plastic scintillator, 50×50×2 cm3 each, which is enclosed in a pyramidal light enclosure with a 5 cm photomultiplier tube at the vertex of the light enclosure. In order to optimize the height of the light enclosure, two parameters are considered: efficiency and uniformity of different parts of the detector. By building and comparing four... 

Emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) from fossil fuels are a potential issue for the global climate. One way to meet this challenge is to electrochemically convert CO2 molecules to reduced carbon species such as formates, alcohols, hydrocarbons, etc., which is a difficult process due to the poor kinetics of CO2 reduction. Therefore, the use of catalysts, while preventing undesirable side reactions, can also play an important role in reducing CO2. In this study, a two-step synthesis of CuS (1, 5, 12, 24 hr) @ Cu-MOF has been reported as an advanced electrocatalyst for CO2 reduction in neutral pH environments. Bismuth has been used to improve the electrocatalytic properties of the samples. Bi-CuS... 

Due to the replacement of fossil fuel with cleaner products, the reduction of fuel consumption in transportation until 2045, the excessive production of fuel oil in refineries and the growth of feed demand from downstream chemical units, have made countries to upgrade their refineries or construct Petro-refineries. The Petro-refinery is a new generation of refinery and its main purpose is to supply chemicals to downstream units. The products of these units will have more valuable than fuel refineries. Steam cracking unit, aromatic unit and propane dehydrogenation unit are important units that are in Petro-refineries. In this research, all refinery units were technically and economically...