Sharif Digital Repository

Over the recent decades, many different ducted turbines have been designed to augment efficiency of wind turbines. The design and number of blades are the most important parameters to optimize efficiency of wind turbines. In this paper, effects of design, number and attack angles of blades on rotational speed are experimentally studied in a duct which increases wind velocity up to 2.46 times numerically and 2.32 times experimentally as great as far-field flow. In order to realize this, 3 different types of aerodynamic blades were designed and then, 2-bladed, 3-bladed and 4-bladed impellers were created by these blades; finally, 9 impellers were built on aggregate. The rotational speed of... 

Purpose - This paper aims to develop an adaptive unscented Kalman filter (AUKF) formulation for orientation estimation of aircraft and UAV utilizing low-cost attitude and heading reference systems (AHRS). Design/methodology/approach - A recursive least-square algorithm with exponential age weighting in time is utilized for estimation of the unknown inputs. The proposed AUKF tunes its measurement covariance to yield optimal performance. Owing to nonlinear nature of the dynamic model as well as the measurement equations, an unscented Kalman filter (UKF) is chosen against the extended Kalman filter, due to its better performance characteristics. The unscented transformation of the UKF is shown... 

Eringen's nonlocal theory and an accurate determination of the nonlocal kernel functions for hexagonal close-packed (hcp) crystals are of interest. The kernel functions are closely related to the anisotropy as well as any crystalline symmetries. To this end, five new distinct nonlocal kernel functions which have the characteristics of discrete atomistic Green's functions in the stress space are obtained through consideration of the nonlocal dispersion relations associated with certain directions combined with ab initio Density Functional Perturbation Theory (DFPT) calculations of the pertinent phonon frequencies. This is the first work which provides the nonlocal hcp kernel functions... 

The dilemma with the deficiencies of the nonlocal kernel functions as the building blocks of the Eringen’s nonlocal theory has been of concern. The aim of the current work is to provide a remedy for the calculation of the components of the nonlocal moduli tensor pertinent to face center cubic (fcc) crystals accounting for their true symmetry group. To this end, three new distinct nonlocal kernel functions which are the discrete atomistic Green’s functions in the stress space are obtained through the nonlocal dispersion relations associated with the longitudinal and shear waves in fcc crystals combined with the corresponding ones calculated via ab initio based on density functional... 

The vibration of a simply-supported beam with rotary springs at either ends is studied. The governing equations of motion are investigated considering the nonlinear effect of stretching. These equations are made non-dimensional and solved to the first-order approximation using the two known methods, namely, the multiple scales and the mode summation. The first five natural frequencies of the beam for different pairs of the boundary condition parameters are evaluated. A multilayer feed-forward back-propagation artificial neural network is trained using these natural frequencies. The artificial neural network used in this study shows high degree of accuracy for the natural frequency of the... 

The vibration of a simply supported beam with rotary springs at either ends is studied. The governing equations of motion are investigated considering the nonlinear effect of stretching. These equations are made non-dimensional and then solved to first order approximation using the two methods of the multiple scales and the mode summation. The first five natural frequencies of the beam for few pairs of the boundary condition parameters are evaluated. A multilayer feed-forward back-propagation artificial neural network is trained using these natural frequencies. The artificial neural network used in this study shows high degree of accuracy for the natural frequency of the beam with general... 

An investigation into the dynamics of vehicle-passenger-structure-induced vibration of suspension bridges traversed by accelerating vehicles is carried out. The vehicle including the driver and passengers is modeled as a half-car planer model with six degrees-of-freedom. In addition, the stiffness of compliant bushings at the connecting points of the shock absorbers to the body is considered. The bridge is assumed to obey the Timoshenko beam theory with axial load and arbitrary conventional boundary conditions. The roughness of the bridge is assumed as a differentiable function of location. Due to continuously moving the location of the variable loads on the bridge, and in the presence of... 

Large-scale simulation of spiking neural networks on hardware with a remarkable resemblance to their mathematical models is a key objective of the neuromorphic discipline. This issue is, however, considerably resource-intensive due to the presence of nonlinear terms in neuron models. This paper proposes a novel uniform piecewise linear segmentation approach for nonlinear function evaluations. Employing the proposed approach, we present a uniform-segmented adaptive exponential neuron model capable of accurately producing various responses exhibited by the original model and suitable for efficient large-scale implementation. In contrast to previous nonuniform-segmented neuron models, the... 

This article aims to compensate the velocity and position errors that exist when the star sensor starts to work in a strapdown inertial navigation system aided by celestial navigation. These systems are integrated via unscented Kalman filter to estimate the current attitude and the gyros fixed bias, precisely. Since an accurate integration is desired, the nonlinear attitude equations are utilized in filter and these equations are propagated through a precise discretization method. Then, implementing the back-propagation and smoothing techniques, the initial attitude and the accelerometers fixed bias are also estimated. Finally, carrying out a parallel navigation, the velocity and position... 

In this paper we present a new landmark initialization technique for Bearing-Only Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) algorithm. The initialization scheme is a type of the delayed constrained initialization method and is different from previous approaches. In our work, it is shown that the angle between sequential observations measured by a bearing-only sensor such as pan-tilt camera and the distance between the vehicle and landmark plays an important role in landmark localization accuracy. Considering this fact, a proper constrained function that utilizes the rotation angle of the camera is applied between multiple landmark location estimates and the best estimate is selected. The... 

A new algorithm for complete pre-flight calibration of triple magnetometers is developed. The traditional approach for calibrating these sensors are based on a cumbersome procedure called 'swing' that involves levelling and rotating the vehicle containing the magnetometers through a series of known headings. Application of such a procedure is difficult and costly. Recently, new approaches have been developed to calibrate magnetometers without the need of attitude information. Such methods are used mostly for the calibration of biases and scale factors. Additionally in situations where misalignment errors are also to be estimated, they are usually modelled as errors of a non-orthogonal frame... 

Localization of radio-frequency (RF) transmitters using time difference of arrival (TDOA)-based methods is one of the conventional passive techniques that admits noncooperative source position finding, but suffers from challenging requirements such as precise intersensor synchronization and high-throughput transmission data links. A tradeoff governing the TDOA systems is in the sensor placement configuration. The more distance the sensors are placed, the more accurate localization is carried out, while the cost for the synchronization and data link increases, at the same time. In this work, a novel reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-aided localization system is proposed that enjoys... 

In this study, an attempt has been made to fabricate Cu-SiC nanocomposites by flake powder metallurgy and high-pressure torsion processing techniques at room temperature. Pure Cu and a mixture of Cu and nano-sized SiC powders were mechanically milled separately for 3 h and then green compacts were prepared by uniaxial pressing under 1 GPa pressure. The green compacts experienced 6-turn high-pressure torsion under a pressure of 6 GPa to prepare bulk Cu and Cu-SiC samples. The microstructures of the consolidated samples were characterized using an X-ray diffractometer and a high resolution scanning/transmission electron microscope, and the mechanical properties were evaluated by microhardness,... 

The chemical preparation and crystal structure for a 4,4′- azodi(phenylcyanamide) salt) in the solid state are reported. This compound crystallizes in the triclinic space group P with the following unit cell parameters: a = 9.759(3) Å, b = 11.237(4) Å, c = 11.919(4) Å, α = 95.54(3)°, β = 98.50(3)°, γ = 109.39(2)°, Z = 1 and V = 1204.4(7) Å3. The 4,4′-azodi(phenylcyanamide) dianion, azodicyd2-, is approximately planar, with the cyanamide groups (-N=C=N) in an anti conformation relative to each other and the azo group (-N=N-) adopting the more thermodynamically stable trans conformation. The crystal X-ray analysis shows that there are one azo molecule cation, two tetrabutylammonium cations and... 

We consider a production system with a single product and two classes of customers. Customers are segmented into two classes: 1) loyal and 2) occasional. Each class has a different shortage cost for the system. The demand of the customer classes is assumed to be stochastic and price sensitive, and distributed as a Poisson process. The objective is to determine the inventory rationing as well as pricing policies in order to maximise the profit function of the system. We formulate the problem as a Markov decision problem and characterise the optimal policies for pricing and inventory rationing. The joint pricing and rationing threshold policy is shown to be optimal. The performance of the... 

Increasing access to very large and non-stationary datasets in many real problems has made the classical data mining algorithms impractical and made it necessary to design new online classification algorithms. Online learning of data streams has some important features, such as sequential access to the data, limitation on time and space complexity and the occurrence of concept drift. The infinite nature of data streams makes it hard to label all observed instances. It seems that using the semi-supervised approaches have much more compatibility with the problem. So in this paper we present a new semi-supervised ensemble learning algorithm for data streams. This algorithm uses the majority... 

Increase of nonlinear loads has led to the rise of harmonic currents, voltage distortion and imbalance in power systems. IEEE Std. 1459 proposes new definitions for electric power in sinusoidal, nonsinusoidal, balanced and unbalanced conditions which can be used for compensation of nonsinusoidal and unbalanced systems. Among different definitions, IEEE Std. 1459 proposes the new concept of effective apparent power and power factor which is more related to the real losses in a power system. In this paper, by expansion of definitions of IEEE Std. 1459, instantaneous forms of effective parameters are defined. Then, a new control strategy for a Shunt Active Power Filters (SAPFs) is defined based... 

This paper considers dynamic pricing in a production system with a single product which is demanded by several customer classes. We seek the structure of the optimal policy assuming m available prices and n demand classes that differ based on the lost sales cost they impose on the system. The assumption of different available prices leads to dynamic pricing structure and the assumption of several demand classes leads to rationing which is proposed in the literature of revenue management. We found that an optimal policy structure exists for this combined problem. The optimal policy has a threshold form which lower thresholds are related to the rationing decision and upper thresholds are... 

Electrochemical activity of TiO2 nanotube arrays (NTAs) is restricted by a wide band gap of TiO2. To overcome this restriction, we considered systematic research on two effective methods of doping of TiO2 NTAs such as the N-doping and electrochemical reductive doping and predicting the proper application of them. Band gap narrowing was occurred from 3.16 eV for undoped TiO2 NTAs to 2.9 and 2.7 eV at N-doped and self-doped TiO2 ones respectively. The electrochemical responses of the TiO2 NTAs before and after doping were examined by cyclic Voltammetry (CV) curve. To understand the electrochemical behavior of the undoped and doped TiO2 NTAs, electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) was... 

Although morphological disorder of nanotube structure is further down than the nanoparticular electrode, its density of traps are the hindering effects in the charge transport. In this study, crack-free TiO2 nanotube membranes, which obtained through a re-anodizing process, are fixed on transparent fluorine–tin-oxide glass by applying a few drops of Titanium Isopropoxide without needing the TiO2 powder paste. Front-side illuminated dye sensitized solar cells fabricated by undoped, N-doped and blue TiO2 nanotube membranes are investigated. The electrical characteristics of TiO2 nanotube based dye sensitized solar cells are followed by theoretical analysis using simple one-diode model....