Sharif Digital Repository

When the stiffness of a story is much less than the story above it, a significant portion of lateral displacement of the building is concentrated in this story and soft story is formed. One of the main reasons of soft story in buildings is eliminating or reducing the infill walls in lower stories. This reason is more important than the others because structural engineers usually neglect infill walls in modeling the structure, and on the other hand, architects do not consider the seismic behavior of infill walls during architectural design. In this research, based on the provision of soft story in seismic codes, 2277 macro models with different arrangements of infill walls in the adjacent... 

A significant part of torsional effects in buildings is due to disregarding the arrangement of infill walls during the design. This is a challenging issue since on the one hand the structural engineers do not usually consider infill walls in modeling a structure, while on the other hand the architects do not pay attention to the seismic behavior of infill walls during architectural design. In this research, an approximate method for identifying the torsion caused by infill walls was proposed to be used at the final stages of basic architectural design, which is based on the geometric specifications of architectural plans and does not require structural specifications. For this purpose,... 

In this research, we will use an accelerator for MD simulations, called Atomic Approximation Method, which leads to more efficient simulations without harming the physical properties in simulations. The main idea of this method is to define a virtual material with lower number of atoms, which has the same physical properties as the original material. To demonstrate the validity of the proposed technique the modal analysis results are compared with the ones of the conventional molecular dynamics method. It is shown that this method accelerates conventional MD simulations significantly. Copyright © 2006 by ASME  

Microchannels are at the forefront of today's cooling technologies. They are widely being considered for cooling of electronic devices and in micro heat exchanger systems due to their ease of manufacture. One issue which arises in the use of microchannels is related to the small length scale of the channel or channel cross-section. In this work, the maximum heat transfer and the optimum geometry for a given pressure loss have been calculated for forced convective heat transfer in microchannels of various cross-section having finite volume for laminar flow conditions. Solutions are presented for 10 different channel cross sections: parallel plate channel, circular duct, rectangular channel,... 

For a simple polygon P of size n, we define weak visibility counting problem (WVCP) as finding the number of visible segments of P from a query line segment pq. We present different algorithms to compute WVCP in sub-linear time. In our first algorithm, we spend O(n7) time to preprocess the polygon and build a data structure of size O(n6), so that we can optimally answer WVCP in O(logn) time. Then, we reduce the preprocessing costs to O(n4+ε) time and space at the expense of more query time of O(log5n). We also obtain a trade-off between preprocessing and query time costs. Finally, we propose an approximation method to reduce the preprocessing costs to O(n2) time and space and O(n1/2+ε) query... 

Numerous buildings have been damaged or destroyed in previous earthquakes by developing soft storey. Almost all the seismic codes have provisions to prevent soft storey in structures, most of them have recommended the ratio of stiffness between adjacent storeys, but none of them has proposed the method to calculate the storey stiffness. On the other hand a great number of previous researches on stiffness have been focused on approximate methods and accurate methods by using analytical softwares have been almost neglected. In this study, six accurate methods for calculating the storey stiffness have been studied on 246 two-bay reinforced concrete frames. It is shown with the results of the... 

Coordination of decentralized supply chains using contract design is a problem that has been widely addressed in the literature. We consider a divergent supply chain including a supplier and several retailers producing fashion products with short sale seasons. The retailers cooperate with the supplier as sales agents; i.e.; they work in the framework of revenue sharing contracts. Because of their proximity to the market, retailers can provide more accurate demand forecasts to the supplier that is used to decide on issues such as capacity building and market prices with regard to retailers stiff due dates, different lead times and different price-dependent demand functions. To ensure abundant... 

In this paper, we consider the problem of optimum rate adaptation and power allocation to maximize the delay-limited throughput (DLT) in a time-correlated 2×1 MISO Rayleigh fading channel with Hybrid ARQ in Chase-Combining mode (HARQ-CC). To this aim, we have first formulated the DLT equation based on the outage probability for 2×1 MISO-HARQ channel. We show that exact analytical calculation of the outage probability is not tractable. Therefore, we approximate the outage probability using a log-normal approximation approach. Based on such approximation, optimal rate and power allocations are derived. Finally, using Monte-Carlo simulation, we show that the approximation method provides... 

Controlling inverters with LC output filters in order to achieve a high quality desired output voltage or current is a challenging problem in power electronics. The LC filter and the binary nature of switch state variables increase the difficulty of achieving a single comprehensive model for the system. In this paper, a hybrid model is presented for a three-phase inverter with an LC output filter and a three-phase RL load. Then, the Model Predictive Control (MPC) algorithm is applied to the model and a geometrical approximate method is used to fit the answers to the binary values. Simulation results for a sample system verify the usability of the method and the quality of the answers  

A production-routing problem with price-dependent demand (PRP-PD) is studied in this paper. Demand follows a general convex, differentiable, continuous and strictly decreasing function in price. The problem is modeled as a mixed integer nonlinear program (MINLP). Two Outer Approximation (OA) based algorithms are developed to solve the PRP-PD. The efficiency of the proposed algorithms in comparison with commercial MINLP solvers is demonstrated. The computational results show that our basic OA algorithm outperforms the commercial solvers both in solution quality and in computational time aspects. On the other hand, our extended (two-phase) OA algorithm provides near-optimal solutions very... 

Microchannels are at the fore front of today's cooling technologies. They are widely being considered for cooling of electronic devices and in micro heat exchanger systems due to their ease of manufacture. One issue which arises in the use of microchannels is related to the small length scale of the channel or channel cross-section. In this work, the maximum heat transfer and the optimum geometry for a given pressure loss have been calculated for forced convective heat transfer in microchannels of various cross-section having finite volume for laminar flow conditions. Solutions are presented for 10 different channel cross sections, namely parallel plate channel, circular duct, rectangular... 

A Mobile Ad Hoc Network (MANET) is an infrastructure-less network composed of mobile devices. In order to meet the foresight of newly developing MANETs, a method of maintaining a real-time flow despite dynamic topology and random movement of users is required. Mobility prediction is one of the keys to successful design of efficient protocols to find stable and reliable routes in MANETs. An important characteristic of a MANET is the distribution of the link distance between communicating users. In this paper a novel mobility model is developed for users of a MANET wandering in an unlimited area and is used to derive an analytical framework to approximate the communication links distance... 

This paper introduces an analytical method to approximate the fraction of jobs missing their deadlines in a soft real-time system when the earliest-deadline-first (EDF) scheduling policy is used. In the system, jobs either all have deadlines until the beginning of service (DBS) and are non-preemptive, or have deadlines until the end of service (DES) and are preemptive. In the former case, the system is represented by an M/M/m/EDF+G model, i.e., a multi-sever queue with Poisson arrival, exponential service, and generally distributed relative deadlines. In the latter case, it is represented by an M/M/1/EDF+G model, i.e., a single-server queue with the same specifications as before. EDF is... 

Delta-orthogonal multiple access (D-OMA) has been recently investigated as a potential technique to enhance the spectral efficiency in the sixth-generation (6G) networks. D-OMA enables partial overlapping of the adjacent sub-channels that are assigned to different clusters of users served by non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA), at the expense of additional interference. In this paper, we analyze the performance of D-OMA in the uplink and develop a multi-objective optimization framework to maximize the uplink energy efficiency (EE) in a multi-access point (AP) network enabled by D-OMA. Specifically, we optimize the sub-channel and transmit power allocations of the users as well as the... 

The response of a suspended cables subjected to narrow-band random excitations with two types of peaked P.S.D. is formulated and analyzed. Banach fixed-point theorem is used for eigenfunction analysis of the differential-integral equations of motion for the first time in this paper. Fredholm approach also is used in the free vibration analysis of the suspended cable and then using Galerkin mode approximation method, power spectral density, and root mean square of the response are computed for two practical types of excitation. All of the calculated results converted to dimensionless quantities make their usage easier in vibration analysis of some practical cases such as vibration of moving... 

This paper introduces an analytical method for approximating the performance of a firm real-time system consisting of a number of parallel infinite-capacity single-server queues. The service discipline for the individual queues is earliest-deadline-first (EDF). Real-time jobs with exponentially distributed relative deadlines arrive according to a Poisson process. Jobs either all have deadlines until the beginning of service or deadlines until the end of service. Upon arrival, a job joins a queue according to a state-dependent stationary policy, where the state of the system is the number of jobs in each queue. Migration among the queues is not allowed. An important performance measure to... 

In this work a new method for analyzing nanostructured materials has been proposed to accelerate the simulations for solid crystalline materials. The proposed Structural Approximation Method (SAM) is based on Molecular Dynamics (MD) and the accuracy of the results can also be improved in a systematic manner by sacrificing the simulation speed. In this method a virtual material is used instead of the real one, which has less number of atoms and therefore fewer degrees of freedom, compared to the real material. The number of differential equations that must be integrated in order to specify the state of the system will decrease significantly, and the simulation speed increases. To generalize...