Sharif Digital Repository

v.1. Structural engineering and earthquake engineering.-- v.2. Geotechnical engineering.-- v.3. Transportation, civil engineering materials, construction management.-- v.4. Water resources and environmental engineering, surveying and mapping  

The final outcome of promotion and recruitment processes in universities should be conventional and plausible by the members of the relevant scientific community, to affirm that the processes have been competitive and fair. The objective of this opinion letter is to make a plea for the importance of the post-auditing and quantitative assessment of the selection criteria. It is shown that for an example case the outcome of the post-audit does not look reasonable from an external point of view, at least regarding the research competency  

The final outcome of promotion and recruitment processes in universities should be conventional and plausible by the members of the relevant scientific community, to affirm that the processes have been competitive and fair. The objective of this opinion letter is to make a plea for the importance of the post-auditing and quantitative assessment of the selection criteria. It is shown that for an example case the outcome of the post-audit does not look reasonable from an external point of view, at least regarding the research competency. © 2015, Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht  

HSE management is one of the key topics in project management that plays a significant role in indication of success and soundness of projects. According to the official reports and statistics, construction industry has annually incurred a great deal of expenses and losses due to neglecting the role of HSE issues in the projects worldwide. Since many challenges and problems related to HSE faced Iranian civil engineers and construction managers, recently the HSE have been regarded as a highly critical issue in Iran. Observations show that many Iranian managers and engineers, in their daily activities, have the tendency to ignore the HSE related rules. The aim of this research is to evaluate... 

Organoclay modification is receiving attention as a nano-modifier for asphalt binders. Nanoparticles are able to effectively mend the damaged sites of the nanocomposite without external intervention. Particle-polymer interaction results in packing particles into developed cracks, thereby mending the cracks during patch formation. This study investigates the rheological properties of organoclay modified binders with a focus on their fatigue properties. To this end, the dissipated energy concept, the ratio of dissipated energy change and plateau value (PV) energy were examined during fatigue tests using a dynamic shear rheometer. The effects of strain level, frequency and temperature on unaged... 

Geotechnical engineering is a fundamental subject in civil and environmental engineering that engineers are required to refer to when any type of retrofitting, design or construction of projects and developments are encountered in a city or in a rural area. Indeed in many projects like geotechnical structures, such as earth dams, geotechnical engineering is the main subject. In this paper, the role of geotechnical engineering in sustainable and resilient cities is elaborated mainly through a series of questions and answers. Also, some related geotechnical engineering research, that is in hands in Civil Engineering Department of Sharif University, is discussed in this paper. A unique... 

Shape Memory Alloys (SMAs) are a new generation of smart materials with the capability of recovering their predefined shape after experiencing a large strain. This is mainly due to the shape memory effects and the superelasticity of SMA. These properties make SMA an excellent alternative to be used in passive, semi-active, and active control systems in civil engineering applications. This paper presents a comprehensive review of the recent developments in the applications of SMA in civil infrastructures, including, steel, concrete, and timber structures. This review reveals the significance of SMA in civil infrastructures particularly, the enhancement of structural behavior and energy... 

Settlement is one of the most important effects of tunnelling. In order to minimize this effect, it is necessary to arrange for circumstances to keep the strain and stress state of undisturbed soil within a tight limit. To achieve this, it is common nowadays to use closed face pressurized shields such as EPB TBMs. In this type of shield, face stability and ground settlement control is maintained by pressurizing the tunnel face with adjustment of cutter head thrust and muck removal discharge. In this paper, numerical modeling of excavation of twin tunnels in Tabriz subway is addressed with respect to the effect of EPB tunnelling in settlement control. Settlement and lining thrust are... 

Nonlinear static methods are simplified procedures in which the problem of evaluating the maximum expected response of a MDOF system for a specified level of earthquake motion is replaced by response evaluation of its equivalent SDOF system. The common features of these procedures are the use of pushover analysis to characterize the structural system. In pushover analysis both the force distribution and the target displacement are based on the assumptions that the response is controlled by the fundamental mode and that the mode shape remains unchanged after the structure yields. Therefore the invariant force distributions does not account for the change of load patterns caused by the plastic... 

Labyrinth side weirs provide a potentially effective way to shorten the length of a channel opening with the desired water height, but the discharge coefficient needs to be found experimentally. Experiments were carried out for triangular labyrinth side weirs with one and two cycles in order to obtain the discharge coefficient. The test variables included channel opening, head angle, number of cycles, weir height, upstream water depth and discharge in a subcritical situation. The resultsshow that the discharge coefficient ratio for a triangular labyrinth to a conventional side weir could rise to more than 2 with the same flow and geometric conditions. Relationships for the De Marchi... 

Iran is engaged in a long-term program to improve and strengthen its position among producers of petroleum in the world. In this regard, many projects are planned and executed in different fields related to oil and gas industry. Prior to investment in new projects, it is essential to understand and manage major corporate risks and their related consequences. Due to nature of petroleum industry, Health, Safety and Environmental (HSE) issues are associated with such projects and have always been matters of concern. This paper directs readers towards the integrated HSE approach from concept to affect project construction phase. The process of oil production includes exploration, extraction and... 

In Endurance Time (ET) method gradually intensifying acceleration functions are created in a manner that the linear and nonlinear response spectra of them, while being proportional to average of real earthquakes spectra, intensifies in a uniform manner with time. These functions are used as input functions for nonlinear time history analysis of structures and performance of structures is assessed based on the maximum time duration that they can meet the specified performance objectives. In this paper, application of the ET method in nonlinear seismic analysis of structures has been investigated. Numerical procedures and optimization techniques that are used for the production of acceleration... 

The history of the building structures damaged during previous earthquakes reveal that one of the causes of these damages was the existence of some sort of irregularity in the structure of these buildings. In this work, the effects of irregularities due to the split in the levels of various parts of some 2D steel structures (Split Level) on their seismic behaviour are studied. The studied frames consist of five-, ten- and fifteen-storey frames, each with 0, 30, 60, 90, 120, and 150 cm split between the storey levels of the two parts (sides) of the building. The modal analysis of these frames showed that a high percentage of their base shear is transferred to the foundation through the... 

Multiple Discrete Continuous Extreme Value (MDCEV) has become popular in the past years. Yet, the model suffers from an ‘empirical identification’ issue that is mainly due to inter-relations between two of its parameters, α and γ. This paper presents a hybrid optimization paradigm (named HELPME) to address this issue in a basic MDCEV formulation and take full advantage of the model by estimating a ‘mixed-profile.’ HELPME benefits from a coarse-to-fine search strategy, in which a customized Electromagnetism-like meta-heuristic precedes a gradient-based approach. The Atlanta Regional Travel Survey (2011) is used to empirically analyze performance of HELPME as well as significance of the... 

Pushover analysis is a simplified nonlinear analysis technique that can be used to estimate the dynamic demands imposed on a structure under earthquake excitations. One of the first steps taken in this approximate solution is to assess the maximum roof displacement, known as target displacement, using the base shear versus roof displacement diagram. That could be done by the socalled dynamic pushover analysis, i.e. a dynamic time history analysis of an equivalent single degree of freedom model of the original system, as well as other available approximate static methods. In this paper, a number of load patterns, including a new approach, are considered to construct the related pushover... 

In this article, a new method for the seismic resistant design is introduced. At first some formulation necessary for the introduction of the proposed method is carried out. This new procedure directly deals with ductility and takes into account the amount of ultimate displacement and required strength interactively. This design procedure is verified by extensive numerical examples using some actual earthquake records. The procedure is shown to be completely safe and to reduce the amount of inherent conservatism. Moreover, it has been tried to introduce some applicable correction factors. Copyright © (2006) by Earthquake Engineering Research Institute  

Lateral spreading generated by earthquake induced liquefaction, is a major cause for significant damage to the engineered structures, during earthquakes. Knowing the amount of displacement which is likely to occur due to the lateral spreading, will lead to better construction policies, and will reduce unexpected damages. A Neuro-Fuzzy model based on subtractive clustering is developed to predict the amount of lateral spreading expected to occur due to an earthquake. A large database containing the case histories of observed lateral spreading during seven major earthquakes of the past is used for training and evaluating the models. The results of this study show that Neuro-Fuzzy method serves... 

A rectangular labyrinth weir has a very good flood release capacity as well as strong economical and structural advantages. In this study, combined analytical and experimental investigations were undertaken for a rectangular labyrinth weir. The analytical model is based on the synthesis of general weir equations and spatially varied flow dynamic equations. A comprehensive set of experiments led to characterisation of the flow behaviour for low and high heads over the weir and indicated the influences of weir geometry on the release capacity. The results show that this type of weir represents an effective weir alternative and could be five times more efficient than a corresponding traditional... 

Daily development in civil engineering arena and the importance of economical aspects in the design of structures have motivated the engineers to shift their approaches from designing upon strength to designing upon performance. This is of more importance regarding the forces induced by earthquakes which have unpredicted and random nature. However, it is not possible to design or assess exactly the structural performance against strong ground motion using analytical methods which are applied for static loads and therefore precise dynamic analysis methods are needed. Despite significant progress in the analytical methods and engineering software, using nonlinear time history analysis is very... 

Development of technology has made possible the invention of innovative and modern methods to partially solve the problems caused by traffic congestion through decreasing the need for physical transportation; one such method being telecommuting. Although, research has been conducted to model employees' and employers' attitude towards telecommuting at micro levels, few predictions have been reported regarding its aggregate demand at the macro level of a city, generally because of the complexity and multi-dimensionality of the subject. In this paper, an approach for the estimation of potential aggregate telecommuting demand is proposed to partly fill the gap in the literature; and applied for...