Sharif Digital Repository

In this study, numerical modeling of the micromechanical behavior of gravel aggregates applicable for base and sub-base of roads and railways under triaxial compression tests is conducted. The material is a type of well-graded gravelly soil with a maximum particle size of 20 mm, whose application is recommended by the UK Highways Agency. The prominent role of this material in the performance and endurance of the roads shows the importance of studying its behavior to acquire a better understanding of its mechanical properties. A number of triaxial tests using monotonic and cyclic loadings have been performed in the laboratory to investigate the behavior of this type of material. In the... 

Rubble mound low-crested breakwaters protect the structures and ships in the port against wave attacks. Due to the overtopping, these structures provide a more attractive landscape and helps preserve the port's environment. Stability of low-crested breakwaters relies on the stability of the armor layer against the wave action, requiring the choice of the appropriate diameter for the armour blocks. For cubic armours that are of interest to the designers, there is currently no design relationship, and they inevitably use formulae specified for high-crested breakwaters that may not be in the safe side. The conventional method for determining the required armour diameter for a breakwater is... 

A considerable number of engineering applications deal with flow of fluid(s) through particulate porous media. For certain engineering problems, fluid flow may displace and even dislodge the solid particles from the mass where a fluid-particle flow occurs. The complexity of involving processes which should be studied at the scale of moving particles transforms the analyses of these problems towards a difficult engineering task. Characteristics of solid grains such as size and shape and properties of the flowing fluid(s) such as viscosity and surface tension play essential roles in the behavior of fluid-particle systems. Also, when fluid flows through porous media, secondary processes such as... 

Occurrence of scouring around the seabed pipelines can lead to pipe failure and pose a serious threat to the marine environment, economic losses and waste of oil and gas. Therefore, to prevent the occurrence of scouring, by simulating this phenomenon and identifying the parameters affecting it, we can help to design a more efficient placement of pipes in the seabed. Various methods such as potential flow theory and turbulent single-phase and two-phase models have been proposed to simulate this phenomenon. The purpose of this article is to simulate and investigate the effective parameters of this phenomenon by combining computational fluid dynamics and separate elements. The innovation of... 

This study presents an integrated two-dimensional numerical framework for simulating rainfall-induced landslides from instability initiation to post-failure flow. The discrete element method (DEM) is used to establish a rheological model that relates the apparent viscosity of a granular sand to shear rate, normal stress, and water saturation. A theoretical model is developed to determine water distribution and water-induced forces between particles for different saturations. The resulting forces are embedded in a 3D shear cell as a numerical rheometer and a wet sand is sheared between two walls. A power law rheological model is obtained as a function of inertia number and saturation. It was... 

The repair, maintenance and cleaning of marine equipment and ships, as well as the optimization of these operations to reduce their costs have always been of interest to researchers. After a few hours of floating in seawater, an inanimate organic layer forms on the surface of marine structures. After a few months, the thickness of this layer increases. This will increase the drag by 30 to 40 percent. Hull cleaning operation increases efficiency, saves time and money, prolongs equipment life and reduces maintenance and repair costs.In this project, the types of marine fouling according to environmental conditions were identified, next a type of fouling (Barnacle) was selected, which has more... 

Laser-assisted machining is nowadays considered as an alternative to conventional machining processes including ceramics grinding, which has provided the basis for extensive experimental and numerical studies in this field. Since the main difference between laser-assisted machining and conventional machining is in the presence of lasers, the main purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of laser on the laser assisted machining process. In this regard, in the first step the process of laser heating to the ceramic workpiece has been studied experimentally and numerically by finite element method. The material used in this research is a slip cast fused silica ceramic. The... 

Selective laser sintering is an additive manufacturing technique based on fusion of powder bed, wherein after spreading a powder layer, a focused laser beam directs onto selected points of powder bed to fuse powder particles together. This process is repeated layer by layer until the final part is created. Although utilization of blade as a conventional powder spreading (CPS) mechanism has a good compression ability, the fixed contact line between blade and powder bed surface results in improper powder flowability and increasing shear forces applied on underneath layer. In this study, in order to obtain the basis for conducting practical experiments, discrete element simulation of powder... 

Selective laser sintering is a technique which uses a laser as the power source to sintering some selected points at a bed of powder in order to create a solid structure. In this research the SLS mechanisms of powder deposition is simulated and surface smoothness and layer density created by each mechanism is computed. For this purpose roller, blade and hopper mechanisms are simulated. For this simulation, polyamide 12 (PA2200) which is a common material is used. In this simulation at first powder specifications are extracted according to the references and for particle shape instead of using the spherical particle shape we use a certain shape that is more close to reality which created by... 

Additive manufacturing (Simply called A.M.) is a group of manufacturing technologies that is developing rapidly and is being used widely in some industries like car manufacturing, Aerospace and producing Biomedical devices, In a way that some researchers believe that A.M. methods will change the future of manufacturing. One of the most important A.M. techniques is the Selective Laser Sintering (SLS) method that is mostly used in industrial applications. A SLS machine has a lot of sub systems and mechanisms that have key role in the Laser Sintering process. One of the mechanisms of SLS machine is the Powder Dispensing mechanism that produce layers of unsintered powder as thin as 100 microns... 

Regarding the popularity and progression of iron production with direct reduced method in the world, one of the most common methods of quality maintaining of DRI (Direct Reduced Iron) in transporting and make it globally accessible and used, is to convert it to the briquette form. To increase the quality of briquettes and reduce the use of binder, should make sure that the binder and DRI particles with different sizes are totally mixed together and to prevent segregation of particles with different sizes as much as possible while the binder is spread among the whole particles. Therefore, using the static mixer can be the first choice due to its low production, operational, and maintenance... 

Due to the unique advantages of fluidized beds for solid mixing and heat transfer, they are widely used for the thermal processing of solid fuel particles. In practice, such systems are composed of non-conventional fuel particles such as coal or biomass, which are completely different in shape, size, and density from the bed material such as sand. In such systems, correct understanding of the main fluidization parameters such as the minimum fluidization velocity (Umf) of the bed components plays a key role in the successful design and control of the system. However, the onset of fluidization of irregular particles is not clear as it may vary depending on the physical properties of the... 

In this thesis, the separation process for used and relatively new catalysts of residue fluid catalytic cracking unit by applying an electric field was evaluated. The main purpose of this dissertation is to simulate and design a separation system for separating used and relatively new catalysts of the FCC process in the electrostatic fields. In this regard, various separators were studied, and most of them were simulated under different circumstances. Finally, after examining and analyzing the particle behavior in each of the scenarios, the proposed system was introduced as more effective and efficient than the other separators in order to achieve the ideal separation of the used and...