Sharif Digital Repository

In most cases, material failures occur on their surfaces, such as fatigue fracture, wear and friction, fretting fatigue and corrosion, so surface modification is one of the most effective techniques to improve the strength of materials. Correction of near surface grain size to nanoscale is one of the effective ways to improve the strength, fatigue life, toughness and etc. With increasing evidences of novel properties in nanostructured materials, it is reasonable to propose to achieve surface modification by the generation of nanostructured surface layer so that the overall properties and behaviors of the material are significantly improved.By means of surface severe plastic deformation, the... 

Numerous three-dimensional models of laminar flow and heat transfer in rough microchannels are developed and analyzed numerically to compare the effect of roughness elements on the thermal and hydrodynamic characteristics. In these models, the rough surfaces are configured with rectangular, triangular and sinusoidal roughness elements. Here, the effects of the roughness height, roughness element width, roughness element pitch, channel separation, Reynolds number and both Newtonian and non-Newtonian fluid on pressure drop and heat transfer in rough microchannels are all investigated and discussed.H2 thermal boundary condition is considered for all peripheral walls and power law model also is... 

In the present work preparation of Ni-TiO2 films and their microstructural and mechanical properties were studied. For film preparation, DC current mode of electrochemical deposition method was used in Watts Nickel bath with different concentrations of transparent TiO2 sol up to 30 mL/L. It presents a new generation of nano Ni-TiO2 coating as a composite film for corrosion and erosion resistance applications. The best wear volume of 0.0046 mm3 was achieved for 30 mL/L Ni-TiO2 nanocomposite in comparison to 0.0071 mm3 for pure Ni film. Moreover, the coating hardness increased to ~345 HV50 for Ni-TiO2 nanocomposite. Corrosion rate of the coatings improved down to 1.10E-05 mm/year with addition... 

Dye-sensitized solar cell (DSSCS) is the third-generation of solar cells based on semiconductors formed between a photo sensitized anode and counter cathode which make a photo electrochemical system. They haven’t been commercially marketed due to their lower efficiency than the previous generations. In order to achieve the higher efficiency, the electron injection and light absorption must be increased. One way to increase electron injection is doping the semiconductor with an external ion to reduce lattice band gap. In this work, we made powder and Nano-structured film of titanium dioxide doped with various molar ratios of Mg by the sol-gel process. The effect of Mg:Ti molar ratio on... 

This study seeks to compare the effect of curing conditions in the sea, coast, and middle of the island environment on five mix designs of alkali-activated concrete (AAC) based on ground granulated blast furnace slag (GGBFS) and fly ash (FA) and the effect of the ratio of sodium silicate (SS) to sodium hydroxide (SH) and alkali activated solutions (AAMS) to the binder on mechanical properties. The compressive strength and load-deflection test was conducted to obtain uniaxial compressive strengths (UCS), modulus of elasticity ("E" _"S" ), elastic and ultimate strain, and dissipated energy. The most significant decrease in strength was observed in the coastal area and the sea. Also, the... 

Conventional MRI has been used to diagnose different types of brain injuries. However these methods have generally failed to diagnose mild types of injury. We are working on the specification of mild traumatic brain injury, using diffusion MRI data, based on a multi compartment simulation of white matter tissue. This effort is essential for better understanding of underlying tissue micro-structure changes in patients with trauma. Some studies have been used in similar data fitting approaches in order to estimate axon diameter distribution. Specifically, a comparative study between different Compartment Models has shown that “ActiveAx” model has the best agreement with underlying tissue... 

The present thesis investigates the micro-droplet dynamics in an inclined channel covered with flexible structures. For this purpose, the DPD (dissipative particle dynamics) method is used to study the behavior of particles present in the flow, including the droplet, the fluid around the droplet, and polymeric structures. This model leads to a more accurate representation of flow hydrodynamics and indicates the way for exploring and understanding complex fluid properties in real flows. The first part of the thesis deals with the dynamics of rising bubbles attached to a vertical wall under different wettability conditions. Even though bubbles rising freely in a liquid have extensively been... 

In this research, we propose a dynamic econometric microstructure model of trading, and we investigate how the dynamics of trades and trade composition interact with the evolution of market liquidity. We estimate a bivariate generalized autoregressive intensity process for the arrival rates of informed and uninformed trades for fifty actively traded stocks in Tehran Stock Exchange over one year of transaction data. Our results show that both informed and uninformed trades are highly persistent, but that the uninformed arrival forecasts respond negatively to past forecasts of the informed intensity. Our estimation generates daily conditional arrival rates of informed and uninformed trades,... 

Understanding many issues related to environmental geotechnics and soil sciences such as: instability and collapse of soil slopes, sinkholes, leakage from landfills and isolation of nuclear landfills, and optimization Agricultural processing depends on our knowledge of the behavior of unsaturated soils and their volume changes. To better understand the behavior of unsaturated soils, it is important to study the soil-water retention curve (SWRC) and the factors affecting it. These include factors such as porosity, grain size distribution, soil minerals, pore size distribution, and pore water chemistry, which affect soil-water retention curves and volume changes. Since the simultaneous effect... 

Various contaminants and their leachate, when they penetrate into the soil, cause changes in soil microstructure, this change in microstructure leads to changes in soil permeability and volume. In this study, first, the effects of soil microstructure change on the hydraulic conductivity of saturated soil were investigated using the change in initial saturation degree during compaction for compacted samples and the change in sample construction in reconstituted samples. Also, the simultaneous effect of changing the initial microstructure and salt solution on the hydraulic conductivity of saturated silty clay soils using a three-axial permeability device with the ability to measure volume... 

The soil-water retention curves (SWRC) is an unsaturated soil mechanics hydro chemical state surface, which expresses the relationship between the soil suction and water content. The soil-water retention curve could describe the water adsorption and desorption process that happened in soils. The difference between the desorption or drying retention curve and the adsorption or wetting retention curves in a specific soil specimen indicates the hydraulic hysteresis phenomenon. Generally, the amount of water remaining in the drying process is greater than the amount of water adsorbed in the wetting process at a certain amount of suction. Suction due to the combined effects of capillary and... 

Geopolymer concrete is one of the most environmentally friendly concretes that does not have any pollutants harmful to the environment. By-products that are normally harmful to the environment can be used in manufacturing this product, therefore, the use of this concrete is known as the first concrete replacement in the world. In order to use geopolymer concrete, it is necessary to an essential to know the mechanical information of these materials.In this study, the mechanical behavior of geopolymer concrete for fly ash and slag in terms of its stress and strain uniaxial loading and triaxial loading at , and15MPa pressures for three concrete mixing design are investigated.Then the... 

Loess soil layers in semi-arid to arid areas have been deposited through the accumulation of aeolian sediments, resulted in a special metastable and open structure being usually unsaturated in nature. Since naturally occurred loess is widespread, it has been recently considered as a promising resource for constructing earth-fill structures. However, due to different microstructures of intact and recompacted loess, different responses to hydraulic and mechanical loading would be expected. Up to now, the hydro-mechanical behavior of loess from different perspectives has not been linked to its microstructural characteristics. The current research, therefore, aims to provide insight into the... 

The aim of this study was to evaluate the effects of applying low replacement ratios (0.75% and 1.50% of the binder weight) of nano-SiO2 particles with different specific surface areas (200 and 380 m2/g) on the properties of high-performance concrete (HPC). Mechanical (compressive and splitting tensile strengths), electrical resistivity, non-destructive (ultrasonic pulse velocity), and microstructural (mercury intrusion porosimetry, X-ray diffraction, and scanning electron microscopy) tests were conducted to investigate the macroscopic and microscopic effects of nano-SiO2 particles on HPC characteristics. The results indicated that the performance of nano-SiO2 particles significantly... 

Various theoretical studies have been developed to obtain a deeper understanding of concrete behavior lead to the concrete constitutive models in the macroscale. In these models, however, the microstructure of the concrete and its effects on the concrete behavior has not been taken into account.Several numerical approaches have been incorporated to determine the effects of concrete mesostructure on the overall behavior of concrete. They may be classified at least in three main groups. In the first group, Continuum finite element methods (FEM) equipped with interface elements is incorporated. Second group is to incorporate more efficient elements, such as lattice or truss elements, instead of... 

It is well known that the classical continuum theory does not consider size effect in predicting material’s behavior, however at the micro and nano scales, this effect is not negligible and the classical theory has deficiencies at these scales. To take into account the size effect, higher order continuum theories introduce new material constants into the formulation. One famous version of these theories is couple stress which is applied in this research. This theory considers size effect of inhomogeneity by employing Characteristic length of materials. Quasi-static couple stress and classical dynamic approaches do not include explicitly the size of the material unit cell in the formulation... 

In the past, lead-based solders with homogeneous and isotropic behavior were used in microelectronic packages. But today, due to the environmental concerns of lead, lead-free solders have been developed, which consist of a high weight percentage (more than 90%) of tin. Tin crystal shows significant anisotropic behavior, which leads to an anisotropic joint response in miniature solder joints with a small number of grains. In the first part of this research, using the crystal plasticity model, the anisotropic plastic response of tin grain was extracted from bulk solder stress-strain curve, then it was implemented in Abaqus software using built-in Hill's anisotropic plasticity model to consider... 

Electrohydrodynamic (EHD) printing is a novel approach for manufacturing high-resolution structures in micro and nanoscale. This technology is the promoted version of inkjet printing which has reduced nozzle clogging risk and improved the accessible resolution. In this method, ink droplets or jets are formed under the action of an electric field and are used as building blocks of the intended part or pattern. Most research in this field has focused on the formation of monolayer droplets and jets by this technology; however, the EHD printer has a great potential to produce core-shell microstructures in a controlled manner too. These microparticles have unique properties and applications due... 

Cyclic Contraction Expansion Extrusion (CCEE) is a new Severe Plastic Deformation (SPD) method used to refine the microstructure and improve mechanical properties of Magnesium AZ91 alloy. In this study, different CCEE process zones are investigated via optical microscopy to understand this process better. The average grain size in the contraction zone decreased to 8.5 microns from an initial value of 106 microns. In the expansion zone, the average grain size was equal to 4.8 microns. Microhardness tests were conducted to study the improvements in mechanical properties. Microhardness of the sample increased from the initial value of 66 HV to 74.4 HV in the contraction zone and 88 HV in... 

Double cantilever beam (DCB) specimens were prepared according to standard surface mount technology (SMT). The samples were stored inside an environmental chamber at two different relative humidity values (i.e. 40 or 100%) for either 2 or 4 hours. Then they were aged at 25ºC, 75ºC or 125℃ for the same time. Finally, after being cooled to room temperature, fracture tests were performed under mode-I loading conditions at a strain rate of 0.03 s-1 at room temperature. Storage time did not have a significant effect on the fracture behavior. The fracture load and energy of the solder joints decreased significantly when the temperature was increased from 25 to 75℃. By further increase in the...