Sharif Digital Repository

Green leafy vegetables are part of the Mediterranean and Middle East diets, which generate tonnes of green leafy waste. Massive production of such wastes is a challenge for policymakers, scientists, and urban local bodies to use them in a sustainable manner to convert them into valuable products. Higher education institutions such as universities are among the sectors that produce considerable quantities of organic waste daily, generated from restaurants and cafeterias. Hence, this study explores the waste treatment of university campuses using a biotechnological approach, i.e., vermicomposting technology, for sustainable management. In this study, vermicomposting was carried out using three... 

This study aims to study the waste management process and recycling of municipal waste in Tehran. Currently, Kahrizak is the defined landfill area which collects the waste generated from 22 districts of Tehran. The organic wastes undergo to the windrow composting method in order to manage the partial of the waste generated in the city. Samples from the compost pile generated in Kahrizak were examined to evaluate its fertilizer value to be used further by the farmers. The results show that the obtained compost does not reach the acceptable quality to be used further in agriculture, due to lack of homogeneity, aeration and presence of heavy metals. Overall, it has been concluded that, due to... 

Recently, a new class of binary codes for overloaded CDMA systems are proposed that not only has the ability of errorless communication but also suitable for detecting active users. These codes are called COWDA. In [1], a Maximum Likelihood (ML) decoder is proposed for this class of codes. Although the proposed scheme for coding/decoding shows impressive performance, the decoder can be significantly improved. In this paper, by assuming practical conditions for the traffic in the system, we suggest and prove an algorithm that increases the performance of the decoder several orders of magnitude (the Bit-Error-Rate (BER) is divided by a factor of about 400 in some E b/N0's). The algorithm... 

Power electronics is becoming an underpinning technology for modern power systems. Power converters are increasingly used in various applications implying different levels of importance in power systems. Hence, optimal decision-making for manufacturing, control, operation and maintenance of them requires understanding of their importance in the power systems. Furthermore, identifying the converters importance may be beneficial for simplifying the system-level reliability modeling in a large Power Electronic based Power Systems (PEPSs). Thereby, a Failure Mode, Effects and Criticality Analysis (FMECA) approach is proposed in this paper in order to figure out the importance of converters in... 

Pozzolanic materials, either naturally occurring or artificially made, have long been in practice since the early civilization. In recent years, the utilisation of pozzolanic materials in concrete construction has become increasingly widespread, and this trend is expected to continue in the years ahead because of technological, economical and ecological advantages of the materials. One of the latest additions to the ash family is palm oil fuel ash, a waste material obtained on burning of palm oil husk and palm kernel shell as fuel in palm oil mill boilers, which has been identified as a good pozzolanic material. This paper highlights test results on the performance behavior of palm oil fuel... 

In this paper, reliability of conventional pulse width modulation buck-boost converter is analyzed, where the effects of duty cycle, input voltage, output power, voltage gain and time duration are evaluated. These analyses are performed in both continuous and discontinuous conduction modes and Markov process model is utilized to obtain the results. In addition, mean time to failure of this converter is obtained with respect to the aforementioned parameters. In this paper, detailed analyses of reliability in buck-boost converter with different evaluation parameters are presented. Moreover, the plots of MATLAB software are prepared to have complete evaluation in each operating state  

This paper proposes Blenda, a dynamically-partitioned memory-cache blend architecture for giga-scale die-stacked DRAMs. Blenda architects the stacked DRAM partly as memory and partly as cache, and dynamically adjusts each part's size to workloads' demands. The memory part hosts hot data objects and serves requests to them efficiently (i.e., without metadata overheads). The cache part captures transient data and filters requests to bandwidth-limited off-chip DRAM. Blenda provides three key contributions: (i) Blenda partitions stacked DRAM's capacity in a workload-aware manner: different workloads enjoy different memory-cache configurations. (ii) Blenda is reactive: the configuration is... 

In an ac microgrid, a common frequency exists for coordinating active power sharing among droop-controlled sources. A common frequency is absent in a dc microgrid, leaving only the dc source voltages for coordinating active power sharing. That causes sharing error and poorer voltage regulation in dc microgrids, which in most cases, are solved by a secondary control layer reinforced by an extensive communication network. To avoid such an infrastructure and its accompanied complications, this paper proposes an alternative droop scheme for low-voltage dc microgrid with both primary power sharing and secondary voltage regulation merged. The main idea is to introduce a non-zero unifying frequency... 

In a classical ac microgrid (MG), a common frequency exists for coordinating active power sharing among droop-controlled sources. Like the frequency-droop method, a voltage-based droop approach has been employed to control the converters in low voltage direct current (LVDC) MGs. However, voltage variation due to the droop gains and line resistances causes poor power sharing and voltage regulation in dc MG, which in most cases are solved by a secondary controller by using a communication network. To avoid such an infrastructure and its accompanied complications, this paper proposes a new droop scheme to control dc sources by introducing a small ac voltage superimposed onto the output dc... 

Centralized or decentralized secondary controller is commonly employed to regulate the voltage drop raised by the primary controller. However, in the case of high capacity microgrids (MGs) and long feeders with much voltage drop on the line resistances, the conventional methods may not guarantee the voltage regulation on the load busses within a suitable range. Therefore, in addition to compensate the voltage drop of the primary controller, it is necessary to regulate the voltage of critical loads. In this paper, a new voltage regulation strategy is proposed to regulate the voltage of MG by employing the average voltage of identified critical busses, which are determined by the proposed... 

The expected lifetime of a power electronic converter is limited by its fragile components such as semiconductor devices and capacitors. These components are prone to wear-out failures depending on the converter mission profile and component thermal characteristics. This paper explores the wear-out failure of the power converter semiconductor devices in inverting and rectifying modes of the converter using different power factors. The obtained results show the different wear-out characteristics of a converter under rectification, inversion, and also partial-inversion/rectification modes as well as when provides reactive power support. Moreover, this paper proposes B10 lifetime curves to... 

This paper proposes a class of estimators for population correlation coefficient when information about the population mean and population variance of one of the variables is not available but information about these parameters of another variable (auxiliary) is available, in two phase sampling and analyzes its properties. Optimum estimator in the class is identified with its variance formula. The estimators of the class involve unknown constants whose optimum values depend on unknown population parameters. In earlier research it has been shown that when these population parameters are replaced by their consistent estimates the resulting class of estimators has the same asymptotic variance... 

We propose to use a compressed sensing recovery method called IMATCS for improving the resolution in microwave imaging applications. The electromagnetic inverse scattering problem is solved using the Distorted Born Iterative Method combined with the IMATCS algorithm. This method manages to recover small targets in cases where traditional DBIM approaches fail. Furthermore, by applying an L2-based approach to regularize the sparse recovery algorithm, we improve the algorithm's robustness and demonstrate its ability to image complex breast structures. Although our simulation scenarios do not fully represent experimental or clinical data, our results suggest that the proposed algorithm may be... 

Two-dimensional elastic contact problem of an asymmetrical rounded apex wedge with a half plane is considered and an analytical solution is presented for vertical and horizontal external loading in the presence of coulomb friction. The pressure and shear distribution functions are found in closed form under partial slip condition. Further by utilizing a new relation Muskhelishvili's potential function is obtained and results are analyzed. Designing better cutting tools, selecting fretting fatigue test pads and deeper lap joint analyzing are several practical applications of the outcomes  

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to explore the process and competitive factors of entrepreneurship in digital space in Iran. Design/methodology/approach: In the last decades, the development and advancement of information and communication technologies (ICTs) and the business innovations related to them have defined a new economy which is known as "digital economy". Establishing and running businesses in this digital space means carrying out a kind of electronic commerce by exploiting the internet and other electronic networks. The new digital economy provides exceptional opportunities for many entrepreneurs to create new ventures in different business areas according to electronic... 

This letter presents a fast microwave imaging technique based on the concept of smoothed minimization and adaptive thresholding. The distorted Born iterative method (DBIM) is used to solve the electromagnetic (EM) inverse scattering problem. We propose to solve the set of underdetermined equations at each iteration of the DBIM algorithm using an L2 regularized iterative smoothed adaptive thresholding (L2-ISATCS) technique. Our simulation results confirm that this technique can reduce considerably the required reconstruction times for the DBIM method relative to previously suggested compressed sensing (CS)-based approaches  

We propose a new image recovery method to improve the resolution in microwave imaging applications. Scattered field data obtained from a simplified breast model with closely located targets is used to formulate an electromagnetic inverse scattering problem, which is then solved using the Distorted Born Iterative Method (DBIM). At each iteration of the DBIM method, an underdetermined set of linear equations is solved using our proposed sparse recovery algorithm, IMATCS. Our results demonstrate the ability of the proposed method to recover small targets in cases where traditional DBIM approaches fail. Furthermore, in order to regularize the sparse recovery algorithm, we propose a novel... 

In this paper, an iterative method is proposed to jointly cancel multi-user interference and clipping noise in uplink Multi-Carrier Code Division Multiple Access (MC-CDMA) systems. Clipping is the simplest method to overcome high peak-to-average power ratio of multi-carrier signals but it makes the signals distorted. Reconstruction methods use non-distorted samples to reconstruct distorted samples in the receiver but multi-user interference causes the methods do not work properly because all the received samples are distorted due to clipping and interference and so there is no undistorted samples to be used in recovering clipped samples. On the other hand, multi-user interference... 

In this paper, we propose a new modeling approach for analytical evaluation of normalized throughput and average backoff time for IEEE 802.11 MAC standard in non-saturation mode and with Poisson arrivals. To this end, we map different stages of distributed coordinated function (DCF) onto different components of a closed multi-class BCMP queueing network with arbitrary service time distribution. At the last part of the paper, we illustrate the applicability of the proposed approach by some numerical results in both saturation and non-saturation modes and obtain average backoff time for different arrival rates. © 2007 IEEE  

The effect of up velocity and influent COD concentration on the activity of sulphate-reducing bacteria (SRB) in UASB reactors is discussed. To study these effects, four UASB reactors were built and utilized in parallel. Examinations were carried out in two different concentrations of molasses (500 mg COD/l and 1000 mg COD/l) and four different upward flow velocities. It was observed that at velocities greater than 1 m/h, SRB bacteria were easily washed out from the reactors due to lower density and lack of ability to form dense and firm granules. It was found that in low-strength wastewaters with a COD to sulphate ratio of 2, an upward velocity in the range of 1.5-2.5 m/h could be...