Sharif Digital Repository

The hot deformation behavior of A-286 superalloy has been characterized using hot compression experiments in the temperatures between 1000 and 1100 °C and strain rates varying between 0.001 and 0.1 s-1. In addition, hot workability of this alloy has been analyzed by employing flow-localization parameter. The results show that both kinds of softening mechanism, dynamic recovery and dynamic recrystallization, occur during hot working, where at 1000 °C the main mechanism is dynamic recovery and at higher temperatures and strain rate of 0.001-0.01 s-1 dynamic recrystallization takes place. Calculations demonstrates that this alloy mainly have a good workability for the utilized deformation... 

Untethered small-scale robots can accomplish tasks which are not feasible by conventional macro robots. In the current research, we have designed and fabricated a miniature magnetic robot actuated by an external magnetic field. The proposed robot has two coaxial wheels and one magnetic dipole which is capable of rolling and moving on the surface by variation in the direction of magnetic field. To generate the desired magnetic field, a Helmholtz electromagnetic coil is manufactured. To steer the robot to the desired position, at first the robot dynamics is investigated, and subsequently a controller based on a neuro-fuzzy network has been designed. Finally, the proposed controller is... 

A new face recognition method is proposed in this paper. The proposed method is based on fuzzy regularized linear discriminant analysis (FR-LDA) and combines the regularized linear discriminant analysis (R-LDA) and the fuzzy set theory. R-LDA is based on a new regularized Fisher's discriminant criterion, which is particularly robust against the small sample size problem compared to the traditional one used in LDA. In the proposed method, we calculate the membership degree matrix by Fuzzy K-nearest neighbor (FKNN) and then incorporate the membership degree into the definition of the between-class and within-class scatter matrices and get the fuzzy between-class and within-class scatter... 

Twitter as one of the most important microblogging online social networks has attracted more than 200 million users in recent years. Although there have been several attempts on characterizing the Twitter by using incomplete sampled data, they have not been very successful to estimate the characteristics of the whole network. In this paper, we characterize Twitter by sampling from its social graph and user behaviors through a random walk based sampling technique called Respondent-Driven Sampling (RDS). To the best of our knowledge, for the first time RDS method and its estimator are used in order to obtain uniform unbiased estimation of several key structural and behavioral properties of... 

Effective utilization of solar energy is an urgent global issue for solving current environmental problems and the energy crisis. A challenging issue in water splitting for solar fuel production is developing high performance and scalable photo/electro catalysts using low cost approach. Here, CoO x nanostructures were grown on anodized TiO 2 nanotube arrays (TNAs) by amperostatic electrodeposition method as oxygen evolution reaction (OER) photoanodes. The effects of electrodeposition current density and deposition time on the growth of so-called nanostructures were investigated based on photoelectrochemical (PEC) measurements and structural characterizations. X-ray diffraction patterns of... 

A significant amount of research on self-consolidating concrete (SCC) technology has been devoted to evaluating the suitability of the material for its use in structural applications. However, more research is required to confirm the adequacy of SCC structural members for resisting gravity and seismic loads. This study focuses on the experimental investigation of the seismic performance of interior reinforced concrete beam-column connections with SCC. Four beam-column connection specimens, three with SCC and one with normally vibrated concrete (NC), were designed for this experimental study. Factors such as concrete type (SCC or NC) and axial load ratio (0, 7.5 and 15 % of column section... 

In the last decades, much attention has been paid to the design of multi-speaker voice conversion. In this work, a new method for voice conversion (VC) using nonlinear principal component analysis (NLPCA) is presented. The principal components are extracted and transformed by a feed-forward neural network which is trained by combination of Genetic Algorithm (GA) and Back-Propagation (BP). Common pre- and post-processing approaches are applied to increase the quality of the synthesized speech. The results indicate that the proposed method can be considered as a step towards multi-speaker Voice conversion. © 2007 IEEE  

I present an in-depth review of the trends and the directions taken by researchers worldwide in optical code-division multiple-access (OCDMA) systems. I highlight those trends and features that I believe are essential to the successful introduction of various OCDMA techniques in communication systems and data networks in the near future. In particular I begin by giving a comprehensive review of the construction of optical orthogonal codes (OOCs). Specifically I discuss the recently developed algorithms that are based on matrix algebra, which simplify and enhance the efficiencies of algorithms in OOC generation. In communication systems studies I first focus on and discuss various OCDMA... 

The main aim of this study was to improve current efficiency and to obtain thicker coatings via aluminum oxide (Al2O3) addition to the chromium (Cr) (III) bath. Design/methodology/approach ‐ Pure Cr and nanocomposite Cr–Al2O3 coatings were electrodeposited from Cr (III) bath onto cathode copper substrates by conventional method. Dependence of current efficiency to current density, Al2O3 content and particle size were investigated. Findings ‐ Current efficiency increased with Al2O3 amount and decreased with Al2O3 particle size. Maximum current efficiency was achieved at 25 A/dm2 for pure Cr and 30 A/dm2 for composite coatings. Al2O3 bath content, current density and stirring rate increased... 

Using 3-D scanned data to analyze and extract pore network plays a vital role in investigation of porous media's characteristics. In this paper, a new simple method is developed to detect pores and throats for analyzing the connectivity and permeability of the network. This automated method utilizes some of the common and well-known image processing functions which are widely accessible by researchers and this has led to an easy algorithm implementation. In this method, after polishing and quality control of images, using city-block distance function and watershed segmentation algorithm, pores and throats are detected and 3-D network is produced. This method can also be applied on 2-D images... 

Underwater wireless optical communications are an emerging solution to the expanding demand for broadband links in oceans and seas. In this paper, a cellular underwater wireless optical code division multiple-access network is proposed to provide broadband links for commercial and military applications. The optical orthogonal codes are employed as signature codes of underwater mobile users. Fundamental key aspects of the network, such as its backhaul architecture, its potential applications, and its design challenges, are presented. In particular, a promising underwater localization and positioning scheme based on this cellular network is presented. Furthermore, the proposed network is used... 

Cr and Cr-Al2O3 coatings were electrodeposited from Cr(III) bath with both pulsating and direct current onto copper substrates. Pulsating current resulted in homogeneous films of higher Al2O3 content and lower particle agglomeration than the direct current. Differences were more tangible at shorter duty cycles and pulse frequencies. Pulsating current improved both microhardness and corrosion resistance. The presence of alumina nanoparticles resulted in greater current efficiency, higher film microhardness and better corrosion resistance. Maximum current efficiency, highest microhardness and densest electrodeposited coatings were achieved at current density of 20 A dm-2, duty cycle of 40% and... 

Autocorrelation receiver (AcR) is usually used as the general receiver for transmitted reference (TR) communication systems on a quite intuitive basis. In this paper, we apply the principle of statistical invariance to obtain the optimum TR receiver on a decision-theoretic basis, and it is shown that the autocorrelation receiver is optimal only in a special case. Performance of the optimum receiver and the suboptimum AcR for some important modulation schemes is also evaluated. The results imply that allocating a part of the transmitted energy and bandwidth to reference pulses would not help improve the performance of the system and the optimal performance might be achieved via much simpler... 

In this article we present a new scheme to support multirate and multi-quality-of-service transmission in passive optical networks based on a hybrid wavelength-division multiplexing/optical code-division multiplexing scheme. The idea is to use multilength variable-weight optical orthogonal codes as signature sequences of a hybrid WDM/OCDM system. To provide the requested classes of service, the code weight and code length of MLVW-OOCs are designed based on the characteristics of the requested classes of service. In order to mitigate multiple access interference, we propose to utilize a multilevel signaling technique and interference remover structure based on advanced optical logic gate... 

I present an in-depth review of the trends and the directions taken by researchers worldwide in optical code-division multiple-access (OCDMA) systems. I highlight those trends and features that I believe are essential to the successful introduction of various OCDMA techniques in communication systems and data networks in the near future. In particular I begin by giving a comprehensive review of the construction of optical orthogonal codes (OOCs). Specifically I discuss the recently developed algorithms that are based on matrix algebra, which simplify and enhance the efficiencies of algorithms in OOC generation. In communication systems studies I first focus on and discuss various OCDMA... 

Background: Systemic sclerosis (SSc), a multi-organ disorder, is characterized by vascular abnormalities, dysregulation of the immune system, and fibrosis. The mechanisms underlying tissue pathology in SSc have not been entirely understood. This study intended to investigate the common and tissue-specific pathways involved in different tissues of SSc patients. Methods: An integrative gene expression analysis of ten independent microarray datasets of three tissues was conducted to identify differentially expressed genes (DEGs). DEGs were mapped to the search tool for retrieval of interacting genes (STRING) to acquire protein-protein interaction (PPI) networks. Then, functional clusters in PPI... 

In this study the authors present an in-depth study, analysis and discussion on maximum likelihood (ML)-based receiver for a typical spectrally encoded spread-time CDMA in the presence of multiple narrowband interference (NBI) signals in an additive white Gaussian noise channel. Furthermore, the authors demonstrate that by combining useful properties of ML-based receiver and three-level codes, that is, codes with values of -1, 0, +1, the authors can introduce a new strategy in which superior performance with respect to previous receiver structure based on two-level codes, that is, codes with values of -1, +1, can be attained. With the help of an example, the authors drive, first, the...