Assessment of the Contributions of Traditional Qanats in Sustainable Water Resources Management

Qanats (Kanats) have been an ancient, sustainable system facilitating the harvesting of water for centuries in Iran, and more than 34 additional countries of the world. These subterranean channels have been used for the transference of snowmelt water from the mountainous terrain for thousands of years. Agricultural, industrial and urban demands for fresh water have brought about increasing demands for water, the elixir of life. In response, the harvesting of water via deep groundwater wells throughout arid zones has disturbed the aquifers, and resulted in the abandonment of some qanats. Qanats in the province of Yazd City are witnessing this depletion. This paper introduces qanats, objectives causing their creation, construction materials, locations and their importance in different times, as well as their present role in Iran. Further, current qualitative and quantitative analyses of the qanats in Tehran are identified.     

Human interaction with IoT-based smart environments

This paper describes concepts, design, implementation, and performance evaluation of a 3D-based user interface for accessing IoT-based Smart Environments (IoT-SE). The generic interaction model of the described work addresses some major challenges of Human-IoT-SE-Interaction such as cognitive overload associated with manual device selection in complex IoT-SE, loss of user control, missing system image or over-automation. To address these challenges we propose a 3D-based mobile interface for mixed-initiative interaction in IoT-SE. The 3D visualization and 3D UI, acting as the central feature of the system, create a logical link between physical devices and their virtual representation on the end user’s mobile devices. By so doing, the user can easily identify a device within the environment based on its position, orientation, and form, and access the identified devices through the 3D interface for direct manipulation within the scene. This overcomes the problem of manual device selection. In addition, the 3D visualization provides a system image for the IoT-SE, which supports users in understanding the ambience and things going on in it. Furthermore, the mobile interface allows users to control the amount and the way the IoT-SE automates the environment. For example, users can stop or postpone system triggered automatic actions, if they don’t like or want them. Users also can remove a rule forever. By so doing, users can delete smart behaviors of their IoT-SE. This helps to overcome the automation challenges. In this paper, we present the design, implementation and evaluation of the proposed interaction system. We chose smart meeting rooms as the context for prototyping and evaluating our interaction concepts. However, the presented concepts and methods are generic and could be adapted to similar environments such as smart homes. We conducted a subjective usability evaluation (ISO-Norm 9241/110) with 16 users. All in one the study results indicate that the proposed 3D-User Interface achieved a good high score according to the ISO-Norm scores.     

A novel technology for control of variable speed pumped storage power plant

Variable speed pumped storage machines are used extensively in wind power plant and pumped storage power plant. This paper presents direct torque and flux control(DTFC) of a variable speed pumped storage power plant(VSPSP). By this method both torque and flux have been applied to control the VSPSP. The comparison between VSPSP's control strategies is studied. At the first, a wind turbine with the capacity 2.2 k W and DTFC control strategies simulated then a 250 MW VSPSP is simulated with all of its parts(including electrical, mechanical, hydraulic and its control system) by MATLAB software. In all of simulations, both converters including two-level voltage source converter(2LVSC) and three-level voltage source converter(3LVSC) are applied. The results of applying 2LVSC and 3LVSC are the rapid dynamic responses with better efficiency, reducing the total harmonic distortion(THD) and ripple of rotor torque and flux.