Sharif Digital Repository

Concrete is a heterogeneous material with a wide variety of usage in structural design. Concrete under tension exhibits strain softening, i.e., a negative slope in the stress-deformation diagrams. Different softening curves have been proposed in the literature to interpret this phenomenon. In current research, a new softening curve for concrete has been proposed by using the newly introduced concept of fractal geometry. This new softening curve is denominated a 'Quasi-fractal' softening curve and consists of two parts, a linear portion at the beginning and an exponential portion in the rest of the curve. A comparison of a "Quasi-fractal" softening curve with a set of proposed experimental... 

This article presents the cyclic behavior of the A356.0 aluminum alloy under low-cycle fatigue (or isothermal) and thermo-mechanical fatigue loadings. Since the thermo-mechanical fatigue (TMF) test is time consuming and has high costs in comparison to low-cycle fatigue (LCF) tests, the purpose of this research is to use LCF test results to predict the TMF behavior of the material. A time-independent model, considering the combined nonlinear isotropic/kinematic hardening law, was used to predict the TMF behavior of the material. Material constants of this model were calibrated based on room-temperature and high-temperature low-cycle fatigue tests. The nonlinear isotropic/kinematic hardening... 

In this study, a new method for the simulation of the time-dependent behavior of actin cytoskeleton during cell shape change is proposed. For this purpose, a three-dimensional model of endothelial cell consisting of cell membrane, nucleus membrane, and main components of cytoskeleton, namely actin filaments, microtubules, and intermediate filaments is utilized. Actin binding proteins, which play a key role in regulating actin cytoskeleton behavior, are also simulated by using a novel technique. The actin cytoskeleton in this model is more dynamic and adoptable during cell deformation in comparison to previous models. The proposed model is subjected to compressive force between parallel micro... 

In this way, after experimental measurement of interfacial tension, different models including mono-exponential decay, dynamic adsorption models and empirical equation are used to correlate this time-dependent behavior of interfacial tension (IFT). During the modeling approach, the induction, adsorption, equilibrium, and meso-equilibrium times as well as diffusivity of surface active components known as natural surfactant including asphaltene and resin from crude oil to the interface are obtained. In addition, the surface excess concentration of surface active components at the interface and Gibbs adsorption isotherm are utilized to analyze the measured dynamic IFTs. Finally, the mechanisms... 

Despite several different measures of efficiency that are applicable to the photosynthetic systems, a precise degree of efficiency of these systems is not completely determined. Introducing an efficient model for the dynamics of light-harvesting complexes in biological environments is a major purpose in investigating such systems. Here, we investigate the effect of macroscopic quantum behavior of a system of two pigments on the transport phenomena in this system model which interacts with an oscillating environment. We use the second-order perturbation theory to calculate the time-dependent population of excitonic states of a two-dimensional Hamiltonian using a non-master equation approach.... 

Dynamic behavior of fluid-fluid interactions can potentially affect the performance of any enhanced oil recovery (EOR) process including low salinity water flooding. In this work, dynamic interfacial tension (IFT) of crude-oil/brine system is measured in a wide range of salinity of sea water (SW), from 50-time diluted sea water (SW50D) to 2-time concentrated sea water (SW2C). Contrary to the most of published IFT trends in the literature, for the system under investigation here, as the brine salinity increases the crude-oil/brine IFT reduces, which cannot be explained using the existing theories. The lack of a physical model to explain the observed phenomena was the motivation to develop a... 

In this paper, a constitutive and micromechanical model for prediction of rate-dependent behavior of connective tissues (CTs) is presented. Connective tissues are considered as nonlinear viscoelastic material. The rate-dependent behavior of CTs is incorporated into model using the well-known quasi-linear viscoelasticity (QLV) theory. A planar wavy representative volume element (RVE) is considered based on the tissue microstructure histological evidences. The presented model parameters are identified based on the available experiments in the literature. The presented constitutive model introduced to ABAQUS by means of UMAT subroutine. Results show that, monotonic uniaxial test predictions of...