Sharif Digital Repository

In speech production systems, the vocal tract is modeled by a filter and glottal pulse by an excitation signal. In most traditional systems impulse train or noise is used as the excitation. In this paper the effects of different excitation signals on Mel-generalized cepstral filters (LPC, warped LPC, mel cepstral and ML cepstral) are studied. Excitation signals with different pulse shapes are used. Furthermore, based on voicing power, noise factor is added to the excitation signals. Totally 600 different experiments with different filter types, number of coefficients, pulse shapes, pulse widths and noise power are preformed. Synthesized speech is evaluated by PESQ measure. A number of pulse... 

In this paper fabrication of a 0-3 ceramic/ceramic composite lead zirconate titanate, Pb(Zr0.52Ti0.48)O3 thin film has been presented and then a pressure sensor based on multilayer thin-film PZT diaphragm contain of Lead Zirconate Titanate nanocrystalline powders was designed, modeled and optimized. This multilayer diaphragm in general acts as sensor or actuator. ANSYS was used for simulation of diaphragm. Dynamics characteristics of this multilayer diaphragm have been investigated. By this simulation the effective parameters of the multilayer PZT diaphragm for improving the performance of a pressure sensor in different ranges of pressure are optimized. The optimized thickness ratio of PZT... 

The original article contained a mistake in Equation 1. The corrected Equation 1 is shown below: MX+Cx+Kx=f.The original article has been updated © Springer Nature B.V. 2022  

For characterizing Bauschinger effect factor (BEF) and Bauschinger modulus reduction of an A5083 aluminum alloy experimentally, several uniaxial tension- compression tests carried out in different pre-strain levels using INSTRON testing machine. BEF was investigated using both Welter and Milligan's definitions for various offset values. It was observed that Milligan's definition predicts BEF less than Welter's definition for all offset values. In addition, real loading-unloading behavior of such alloy was recorded to predict residual stresses resulting from autofrettage and shrink fit processes. Variable material properties (VMP) method, which is capable of incorporating real unloading... 

Real loading- unloading behavior of an A5083 aluminum alloy was recorded experimentally. This real behavior was incorporated in the variable material properties (VMP) numerical algorithm to predict residual stresses resulted from autofrettage and shrink fit in two kinds of autofrettage compound tubes. Using an analytical method, residual stresses induced by bore material removal via machining were calculated. Using developed VMP code and isotropic hardening rule in both autofrettage compound tubes, residual stresses resulted from shrink fit and autofrettage processes and via post machining, were estimated. Machining process simulation was performed for 10 mm bore material removal. ANSYS... 

In this paper, using numerical solutions of bore and outer radius hoop residual stresses in various tube geometries for autofrettage prior to shrink fit and shrink fit prior to autofrettage design are investigated, and the results are compared with monobloc autofrettaged and shrunk fit tubes. Both of the former compound tubes induce more compressive bore hoop residual stresses than a monobloc autofrettage and shrunk fit case. Furthermore, in geometries in which maximum bore hoop residual stresses are induced, the outer radius experiences acceptably low tensile residual stresses. Bore hoop residual stresses increase with increase of tube outer radius; however the rate of increasing decreases.... 

In this paper, the path independent interaction integral has been implemented in the framework of the extended finite element method for mixed mode adiabatic cracks under thermo-mechanical loadings particularly in orthotropic non-homogenous materials. The mesh insensitivity and increased accuracy due to the thermal and displacement asymptotic analytical solutions are discussed and the contour independency of the interaction integral is investigated in different examples. Finally, the problem of crack propagation in orthotropic FGM materials under the thermal loading is investigated to assess the accuracy and robustness of proposed approach  

This paper presents an optimal phasor measurement units (PMUs) placement algorithm for the purpose of power system observability and also increasing the performance of secondary voltage control scheme. The optimal placement problem (OPP) is formulated such that to minimize the number of PMU installations subject to full network observability and monitoring pilot buses of the system to improve secondary voltage control performance. The branch and bound optimization method is adopted to solve the OPP problem which is suitable for problems with integer and boolean variables. Topology-based algorithm is used for observability analysis. Constraint functions considering adjacent zero-injection... 

In this article, the control of an electrohydrodynamic 3D printer is studied. The proposed controller has a hybrid piecewise linear feedback form which is designed based on a hybrid model of the printer. The hybrid model is obtained via a gray box identification process whose structure is proposed utilizing the results of the finite element simulation of the printer within the COMSOL Multiphysics software. The asymptotic stability of the hybrid control combined with a hybrid observer is proven using the Lyapunov theory. In addition, the obtained control is applied to the finite element model of the printer to check its performance which shows the success of the controlled system in tracking... 

Excitation signal has essential role in speech synthesis filters to produce natural speech. In this study, a new method is proposed for modeling the glottal pulse shape of a speaker. A search is done on the glottal pulse shape space using simulated annealing method. The PESQ measure and Cepstral distance between the original signal and the synthesized signal are used as the cost function. An LPC filter with 10 coefficients is used as the synthesis filter. The PESQ value between the original and synthesized speech using traditional impulse is 2.402. Here, the glottal pulse for a certain speaker is modeled in three different experiments. In the first experiment, the negative PESQ measure is... 

Epilepsy is a brain disorder that 1% of people population are suffering from. One of the proper non-invasive equipment for diagnosis and analysis of this disease is electroencephalogram (EEG) recordings. However, EEG signals are often contaminated with noises and artifacts that hide epileptic signals of interest. Independent Component Analysis (ICA) is a common Blind Source Separation (BSS) method to denoise EEG signals. ICA has been proved as a worthwhile method to separate the signals of interest from noise and artifacts; nevertheless, it also has some weaknesses. In this work, to improve ICA performance in denoising context, we present an algorithm based on combination of ICA and Time... 

Breast cancer is considered as the most important cause of death among women. Architectural distortions are very important signs of breast cancer and early detection of them is a rewarding work. In this paper we propose a method to recognize architectural distortion from normal parenchyma. In our proposed method, appropriate features are extracted by the analysis of oriented textures with the application of orientation component of recent the state-of-the-art local texture descriptor called Monogenic Binary Coding (MBC). In addition, we transform Region of Interests (ROIs) to polar coordinates in order to highlight some specific patterns in mammograms. Various classifiers are used over a set... 

The axisymmetric contact problem of a rigid inclusion embedded in the piezoelectric bimaterial frictionless interface subjected to simultaneous far-field compression and electric displacement is addressed. With the aid of a robust technique, the coupled governing integral equations of this mixed boundary-value problem are reduced to decoupled Fredholm integral equations with a constraint equation. A useful limiting case for the contact problem of transversely isotropic bimaterials is addressed. The present solution is analytically in agreement with the existing solution for an isotropic bimaterial. Selected numerical results of interest to engineering applications including the radius of... 

The efficiency of low salinity waterflooding, particularly during tertiary mode injection, is highly controlled by in situ mixing between the stagnant regions holding high salinity water (HSW) and the flowing regions containing low salinity water (LSW) because it impacts directly the electrokinetics of wettability alteration and the time scale of the low salinity effect. This study aims to address the effects of oil polarity and charged rock surfaces on the time scale of mixing and transport under two-phase flow conditions. A systematic series of micromodel experiments were performed. The micromodels were first saturated with high salinity formation brine and oil (both model and crude oil);... 

In this paper, we present a novel structure of a snake-like robot. This structure enables passive locomotion in snake-like robots. Dynamic equations are obtained for motion in a horizontal plane, using Gibbs-Appell method. Kinematic model of the robot include numerous nonholonomic constraints, which can be omitted at the beginning by choosing proper coordinates to describe the model in Gibbs-Appell framework. In such a case, dynamic equations will be significantly simplified, resulting in considerable reduction of simulation time. Simulation results show that, by proper selection of initial conditions, joint angles operate in a limit cycle and robot can locomote steadily on a passive... 

In this paper we present a novel planar structure of a snake-like robot. This structure enables passive locomotion in snake-like robots through an auxiliary link in joint and a torsional spring. Dynamic equations are derived, using Gibbs-Appell method. Kinematic model of the robot include numerous non-holonomic constraints, which can be omitted at the beginning by choosing proper coordinates to describe the model in Gibbs-Appell framework. In such a case, dynamic equations will be significantly simplified, resulting in significant reduction of simulation time. Simulation results show that, by proper selecting initial conditions, joint angles operate in a limit cycle and robot can locomote... 

A novel distance measure for distance-based speaker segmentation is proposed. This distance measure is nonparametric, in contrast to common distance measures used in speaker segmentation systems, which often assume a Gaussian distribution when measuring the distance between two audio segments. This distance measure is essentially a k-nearest-neighbor distance measure. Non-vowel segment removal in preprocessing stage is also proposed. Speaker segmentation performance is tested on artificially created conversations from the TIMIT database and two AMI conversations. For short window lengths, Missed Detection Rated is decreased significantly. For moderate window lengths, a decrease in both... 

This paper proposes four methods for improving the performance of keyword spotting (KWS) systems. Keyword models are usually created by concatenating the phoneme HMMs and garbage models consist of all phonemes HMMs. We present the results of investigations involving the use of skips in states of keyword HMMs and we focus on improving the hit ratio; then for false alarm reduction in KWS we model the words that are similar to keywords and we create HMMs for highly frequent words. These models help to improve the performance of the filler model. Two post-processing steps based on phoneme and word probabilities are used on the results of KWS to reduce the false alarms. We evaluate the... 

In this study, the effects of an exercise therapy comprising yoga exercises and medial-thrust gait (YogaMT) on lower-extremity kinetics, pain, and function in patients with medial knee osteoarthritis were investigated. Fifty-nine patients were randomly allocated to three treatment groups: (a) the YogaMT group practiced yoga exercises and medial thrust gait, (b) the knee-strengthening group performed quadriceps-and hamstring-strengthening exercises, and (c) the treadmill walking group practiced normal treadmill walking in 12 supervised sessions. The adduction and flexion moments of the hip, knee, and ankle; pain intensity; and 2-min walking test were assessed before and after treatment and at... 

BACKGROUND: Medial thrust (MT) gait is a nonsurgical approach for reducing the knee adduction moment (KAM) in patients with knee osteoarthritis. However, its usefulness is indeterminate due to scarcity of research about changes in lower extremity kinetics and the ground reaction force (GRF) which have been investigated in this study. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Twenty patients (6 males, 14 females, age: 56.2±6.2 years) with medial knee osteo-arthritis participated in this cross-sectional study. A 12-camera motion analysis system and two force plates recorded kinematic and GRF data while participants walked barefoot along a 12m path with 1) their regular gait pattern and 2) MT gait pattern. The...