Sharif Digital Repository

This study focuses on the risk assessment of reinforced concrete tall buildings subjected to ground motion excitation. In order to assess the vulnerability of tall buildings, twelve-, and twenty-four-story four-bay reinforced concrete moment resisting frames are studied. This evaluation is done through developing fragility curves. These fragility curves provide the probability of exceeding the multiple damage states for a given intensity (e.g. CAV) of ground motion excitation. To develop the fragility curves, a great number of nonlinear dynamic analyses were conducted in the open-source platform OpenSees. Since the PEER Guidelines for Performance-Based Seismic Design of tall buildings (PEER,... 

The tissue characteristics are important for all kinds of medical laser applications in order to understand the interaction mechanisms between light and tissue. Knowledge about light transport in tissue is essential for cancer treatment and cancer diagnostic techniques. By having the diffused reflectance of a tissue we can determine its optical characteristics. In this thesis we have solved the inverse process. That is, we compute the diffused reflectance of a turbid media with pre-determined optical parameters. This problem can be solved using two methods: Monte Carlo simulation and diffusion method. Since Monte Carlo simulation is computationally very expensive, it is not used in medical... 

In this project, polarization properties, intensity of reflected light, by one layer tissue that has specified optical properties has been investigated by means of Monte Carlo simulation. Fresnel's coefficients were considered in this simulation too. The incident beam was assumed very thin with specified wave length and linear polarization parallel to plane of incidence.This beam was radiated from origin to the tissue vertically. The layer consists of homogenous particles with defined radius. Concentration of particles was constant. 10000 photons with specified weight were launched to tissue in each simulation. The results of reflected light from tissue showed that variation of the size and... 

Nowadays, the usage of probabilistic and reliability based frameworks is growing fast with respect to the development of computers. One of the most important issues which can be dealt in the field of structural/earthqauke engineering is the performance evaluation of the buildings equipped with active vibration control systems. In this research, in order to evaluate the performance of buildings probabilistically, the sampling simulation methods are applied. Accordingly, both structures and the loadings during their lifetime are considered as random variables. Therefore, at beginning, it is necessary to propose a model which is capable of producing structures with random properties. In this... 

There is a plethora of research and implementations that intend to increase the performance and reduce implementation costs of network routers. In this work, we review previous designs and propose a new network router design that is based on software-defined networks. Our design separates the data plane and the control plane from each other and connects both parts by using OpenFlow protocol. The control plane consists of a general small computer that utilizes the Quagga software to enforce the routing protocols. The control plane translates routing decisions to OpenFlow instructions and sends them to the data plane. The data plane is based on a switch that supports the OpenFlow protocol... 

In this paper we answer to the following questions: First, whether we obseve conditional convergance indicating that the poor Iranian provinces tend to grow faster than the rich ones? Second, has inter-provinces migration helped the convergence? Three different indices are used for examining inter-province convergance. These include: per capita expenditure and per capita income both from the household survey since 1364 to 1394 and per capita regional GDP since 1379 to 1393. Our results support the convergance phenomena based on all three different indices. For the second question, we use instrumental variable to resolve the potential endogeneity problem caused by the reversed causality... 

Regarding the reduction of high qualified and accessible resources, the waste water treatments are accounted as one of the main challenges in environmental context. Surprisingly, with or without consideration of this issue can lead to play the crucial key in whether development or society retardation. With developing and being more sophisticated of waste water treatment technology and also rising the stringency of environmental constraint, approaching the optimum technology basis economics of scale is time consuming and complicated.Behind this concept, contribution of this study is twofold. The general approach of treatment is identified using AHP methodology in primary stage. After that, it... 

Research for renewable energy has grown considerably over the last years. Osmotic energy is a form of renewable energy which is not yet used at commercial scale, but have a large potential to used at commercial scale soon. Osmotic power is a technique that converts the difference of molar free energy between fresh water and salt water into electricity. Pressure retarded osmosis (PRO) is the most frequently studied process of osmotic energy. In PRO two solutions of different salinities are brought into contact by a semipermeable membrane that only allows the transport of water and retain the solute. Positive developments in recent years initiated new studies to the exploitation of osmotic... 

We present two projected structured algorithms for solving nonlinearly constrained nonlinear least squares problems. The first algorithm makes use of a line search scheme and the second algorithm utilizes a combined trust region-line search scheme. These approaches are based on an adaptive structured scheme due to Mahdavi-Amiri and Bartels of the exact penalty method of Coleman and Conn for nonlinearly constrained optimization problems. The structured adaptation also makes use of the ideas of Nocedal and Overton for handling quasi-Newton updates of projected structured Hessians and appropriates the structuring scheme of Dennis, Martinez and Tapia. For robustness of the first algorithm, we... 

Statistical studies indicate the fact that in Iran, like many other developing countries, a significant percentage of buildings are made of traditional materials and most of them are adobe buildings especially in rural areas. Furthermore, geological data indicates that Iran is located in alps-Himalayas seismic zone and exposed by destructive earthquakes and adobe buildings suffer the most damages comparing with other type of the structures. According to these explanations, this research deals with adobe buildings behavior and provides solutions for reinforcing them and improving the seismic response of these buildings. These studies include numerical modeling with finite elements methods by... 

In this thesis we consider the problem of distributed computation by many processors.We mainly concentrate on matrix multiplication problem in this thesis because of its importance. A distributed system consists of N worker processors and one master processor. The master processor should distribute the computation between workers and after computation in each of them, collect the results. In this thesis, we are going to mitigate the effect of straggler processors by using coding methods. Straggler processors can cause delays in the computation time.In this thesis, we firstly introduce a method to multiply any number of matrices in each other. The proposed method occurred in one shot without... 

The main goal of current investigation was partial reduction of Fe2O3 available in Hematite-rich ore to Magnetite by Fludization Bed method. The reductive gas, CO, was produced by incomplete combustion of Acetylene and Airmixed in inappropriate ratio. X-Ray Diffraction and X-Ray Florescence analyses were implemented in order to conducting qualitative analysis of present phases before and after reduction of the ore. Quantitative analysis of the same phases was also conducted by Titration. The latter analysis revealed the precise magnitude of available iron in each of the oxide containing phases. The chemical composition of the reactor gas was also determined before and after reduction... 

Abstract The problem of competetive facility location can be defined as follows: There are a number of customers in the form of points in space, and two players arrange a number of facilities in the form of points in space, given some limitations, respectively. Each customer’s connection to each facility has a cost for the customer and an advantage for the facility, and each customer wants to be connected to at most one of the facilities which has the lowest cost for him. The goal is to find the strategy of placing the facilities and determining the cost which the facility receives from the customer, in such a way that the player’s profit is maximised.In this thesis, we first sought to... 

Zero knowledge proofs allow a person (prover) to convince another person (verifier) that he has performed a specific computation on a secret data correctly, and has obtained a true answer, without having to disclose the secret data. QAP (Quadratic Arithmetic Program) based zkSNARKs (zero knowledge Succinct Non-interactive Argument of Knowledge) are a type of zero knowledge proof. They have several properties that make them attractive in practice, e.g. verifier's work is very easy. So they are used in many areas such as Blockchain and cloud computing. But yet prover's work in QAP based zkSNARKs is heavy, therefore, it may not be possible for a prover with limited processing resource to run... 

Lightweight clients are a type of blockchain users who do not store all the blocks in the blockchain due to limited resources. These users store only a small part of each block and when needed, request transactions from full nodes that store the entire blockchain. These users have no role in block validation and only want to receive transactions related to their addresses with proof of the inclusion in the block from full nodes.Since light clients rely on full nodes for receiving transactions, their privacy against full nodes is important. The current implementation of Bitcoin uses Bloom filters for privacy, but this offers very little privacy to the users.In this thesis, we study the... 

Soil-structure interaction has significant effect on dynamic behavior of the super structure. This effect is usually investigated in two separate parts, i.e., the Kinematic Interaction effect and the Inertial Interaction effect. The first modifies the input ground motion to the foundation as a result of difference in soil and foundation stiffness. The later, i.e., the II effect, introduces the effect of soil flexibility and radiation of waves into the supporting medium on the response of the structure. These effects are usually considered by introducing a replacement oscillator with modified natural period and damping ratio subjected... 

In this thesis, we consider a network creation game in which, each player (vertex) has a limited budget to establish links to other players. In our model, each link has a unit cost and each agent tries to minimize its cost which is its local diameter or its total distance to other players in the (undirected) underlying graph of the created network. Two variants of the game are studied: in the MAX version, the cost incurred to a vertex is the maximum distance between that vertex and other vertices, and in the SUM version, the cost incurred to a vertex is the sum of distances between that vertex and other vertices. We prove that in both versions pure Nash equilibria exist, but the problem of...