Sharif Digital Repository

This paper presents the design characteristics of a new robot Assistant for Social Aims (RASA), being an upper-torso humanoid robot platform currently under final stages of development. This project addresses the need for developing affordable humanoid platforms designed to be utilized in new areas of social robotics research, primarily teaching Persian Sign Language (PSL) to children with hearing disabilities. RASA is characterized by three features which are hard to find at the same time in today’s humanoid robots: its dexterous hand-arm systems enabling it to perform sign language, low development cost, and easy maintenance. In this paper, design procedures and considerations are briefly... 

ALM is an adaptive recursive algorithm which tries to express a multi-input multi-output system as a fuzzy combination of some single-input single-output systems. It uses a fuzzy curve fitting technique for behavior extraction or finding the input-output transfor-mation of each of the single-input single-output systems, which called ink drop spread (IDS). In this paper we present a new implementation of a hardware unit implementing the ink drop spread (IDS) method  

A mechanical system inherently affected by the conditions, factors, and parameters of uncertainties. Without including the uncertainty effects in the design procedure, the designs may not be robust and reliable. Robust design optimization (RDO) method is a procedure to find the insensitive design with respect to the variations. On the other hand, reliability is measured by the probability of satisfying a specific design criterion. Therefore, a reliable design is a design that satisfies the specified criteria even with some uncertainties in variables and parameters. Reliability-based design optimization (RBDO) is an optimization procedure that incorporates reliability requirements to find the... 

Simply obtained by the oxidation of levodopa in alkaline media, polylevodopa nanoparticles are able to quench the fluorescence emission of CdTe quantum dots (QDs) via energy transfer mechanism. The extent of this quenching can be exploited for the quantification of levodopa, as an important therapeutic agent in the treatment of Parkinson's disease. However, to effectively improve the detection performance, in this study, we have designed a ratiometric probe by making use of variations in both the emission of QDs and the intrinsic emission of polylevodopa nanoparticles. The enhanced sensitivity, in particular, arose from the measurement of the ratio of fluorescence intensities at two... 

Biological treatment, especially enzymatic methods, can be employed for effective and environmental- friendly treatment of dye effluents. Laccase, belonging to the blue multi-copper oxidases category, can oxidize a wide variety of substrates, especially synthetic dyes. In this study, laccase was used to biodegrade two azo dyes, i.e., Direct Red 23 and Acid Blue 92. Before conducting the experiments, the laccase used in this study was enzymatically characterized. Face-centered central composite design (FCCCD) was used to optimize the main parameters of the decolorization process. The optimum conditions to maximize the bio-decolorization process of AB92 were X1=11.85 mg L-1, X2=5.10, and... 

Asynchronous microprocessors are more flexible to adapt to physical parameters, and have lower power consumption than synchronous microprocessors. In this paper we will introduce the design of an asynchronous microprocessor (V8-uRISC) and explore its design process compared to synchronous design. The processor is synthesized by Persia, an automatic tool for synthesizing asynchronous circuits. We have performed full functional test at various levels of design and synthesis. Our results show that an area overhead is expected for the asynchronous design as the cost for lower power and more robustness. ©2007 IEEE  

High-temperature insulators protect structures against extreme thermal loads in various industries such as energy and space-related areas. For such insulations, radiation is the dominant mode of heat transfer. The intended multilayer high-temperature insulator utilizes reflection as the controlling mechanism for the radiative heat transfer. In the current study, the axiomatic design methodology is used to map the design process of a reflective multilayer high-temperature insulator. In addition, an analytical model is developed to simulate the combined radiation and conduction heat transfer in the reflective multilayer high-temperature insulator. The model was solved numerically and validated... 

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  

In this paper, the performance of the benzene gas detection sensor in the air is optimized by an experimental design method. So in this work, Nanostructured thin films of ZnO and Zn2SnO4 were prepared in wurtzite form via a facile atmospheric pressure chemical vapor deposition (CVD) method, using metallic zinc and tin precursors. Characterization of the gas sensor was performed by using Powder X-ray diffraction (PXRD), scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and surface area analysis (using BET method). The results show that Zn2SnO4 nanowire network exhibited good sensitivity at 299 °C temperature to low concentrations (100 ppb) of Benzene which can be potentially used as a resistive gas sensor.... 

This paper introduces a multi-task 4 DOF pole climbing/ manipulating robotic mechanism. A hybrid serial/parallel mechanism, providing 2 translations and 2 rotations, have been designed as the main part of the mechanism. This robotic mechanism can travel along tubular structures with bends, branches and step changes in cross section. It is also able to perform manipulation, repair and maintenance tasks after reaching the target point on the structure. After introducing the mechanism, a kinematics model and the forward and inverse kinematics as well as the workspace analysis of the mechanism are presented  

In this paper, an unsteady, two-dimensional solver is developed, based on Van Leer's flux splitting algorithm, in conjunction with the "Monotonic Upstream Scheme for Conservation Laws (MUSCL)" limiters for improving the order of accuracy. For a minimum usage of computer memory and faster convergence, the two-layer Baldwin-Lomax turbulence model is implemented for a viscous solution. Three test cases are prepared to validate the solver. The computed results are compared with experimental data and the good agreement of the compared results validates the solver. Finally, the solver is used for the flow through a multi-blade stage of an axial compressor in its design condition. The solutions of... 

In this paper we are to present a practical application of Axiomatic Design (AD) methodology, as a roadmap to lean production, in redesigning a car body assembly line. Axiomatic Design theory provides a framework to simplify the whole problem. According to the AD principles, a hierarchical structure has been developed. The developed structure originated in lean manufacturing principles and existing conditions of an assembly line, revealed that elimination of all kinds of waste is a prerequisite for other functional requirements. Several main sources of waste were recognized in the assembly line and some practical solutions are suggested to alleviate these problems. In the initial survey, it... 

Endurance Time (ET) method is a new dynamic analysis procedure that aims at estimating seismic performance of structures by subjecting them to predesigned intensifying acceleration. These acceleration functions are designed in a way that they approximately simulate earthquakes with different intensities through their duration. Performance of the structure is judged based on its behavior for different intensity measures through time. A set of three acceleration functions have been produced using the ET concept by applying optimization techniques. These acceleration functions are designed in such a way that their response spectrum, while complying with typical code design spectra, intensify... 

We study the problem of fair division of a heterogeneous resource among strategic players. Given a divisible heterogeneous cake, we wish to divide the cake among n players to meet these conditions: (I) every player (weakly) prefers his allocated cake to any other player’s share (such notion is known as envy-freeness), (II) the allocation is dominant strategy-proof (truthful) (III) the number of cuts made on the cake is small. We provide methods for dividing the cake under different assumptions on the valuation functions of the players. First, we suppose that the valuation function of every player is a single interval with a special property, namely ordering property. For this case, we... 

The endurance time method is a time history dynamic analysis in which structures are subjected to predesigned intensifying excitations. This method provides a tool for response prediction that correlates structural responses to the intensity of earthquakes with a considerably less computational demand as compared to conventional time history analysis. The endurance time method is being used in different areas of earthquake engineering, such as performance-based assessment and design, life-cycle cost-based design, value-based design, seismic safety, seismic assessment, and multi-component seismic analysis. Successful implementation of the endurance time method relies heavily on the quality of... 

A fast and simple procedure for designing relatively wide band fractional delay (FD) all-pass filters is proposed and filters designed based on it are compared to those designed using Thiran’s method, which is one of the simplest, fastest and widely used approaches in designing FD all-pass filters. It is shown that filters designed using the introduced method have wider fractional group delay (fgpd) bandwidths compared to those obtained via Thiran’s technique, as well as some other desired properties. The designed filters are also demonstrated to be stable for several pairs of filter orders and fgpd values. r2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved  

In this paper, we present an axiomatic modeling of lean production system design, using process variables (PVs). So far, we had developed a model for conceptual design of lean production systems by means of FR-DP relationships, the key characteristics of axiomatic design (AD) methodology, appeared in the proceedings of Second International Conference of Axiomatic Design. Albeit the model in question was thorough enough to be applied in various cases, its embedded abstract principles hamper straightforward applications and the required resources, tools, and techniques are not clarified. In AD terms, it lacks PVs created by mapping the design parameters (DPs) to the process domain to clarify... 

This paper reports on a new method of automatic design. It is a simulation of "human intentional activity," appearing in management, business, various designs and physical work. It is achieved by repetitive hierarchical decomposition of human concepts using (mainly) natural language expressions. Three typical ways (skill, rule and knowledge based) to create the hierarchical decomposition have been implemented and evaluated quantitatively as a CASE tool. The rule-level operation achieves nearly 100% automatic detailing  

In this study, a performance-based optimisation framework is proposed for optimal cross-sectional distribution of steel moment resisting frames (MRFs) subject to earthquake excitations. For the first time, the concept of uniform distribution of damage (UDD) is adopted for the complex optimisation of moment resisting steel frames under dynamic earthquake excitations. To enhance the computational efficiency of the optimisation process, a novel adaptive algorithm is proposed, where the power functions change based on the demand to capacity ratio of the structural elements. The framework is then used for optimisation of 3, 5, 7, 10 and 15-storey steel MRFs under a set of representative... 

A new constant false alarm rate (CFAR) processor is presented, that exhibits a noticeable detection performance in the presence of interfering targets, as well as an excellent false alarm rate (FAR) regulation at the clutter power transition regions. The presented CFAR processor, which is designed to work on the logarithmic amplified video signals, can also easily adapt itself to new environmental conditions. Furthermore, in the steady state, its performance does not depend on the background noise power. Simulation results show the obvious preference of the presented processor to the conventional GOCA-LOG/CFAR, regarding FAR regulation at the clutter power transition regions. Noncoherent...