Sharif Digital Repository

Flow turbulators have promising heat transfer applications. Here, the novel design proposed in our previous study (vibrational ball turbulators, VBTs, mounted on an elastic wire inside a circular tube) is investigated experimentally from heat transfer and thermal performance standpoints. The effects of diameter (Y) and longitudinal distance (pitch, X) ratios of VBTs, the Reynolds number, and the axial tension of the wire (σ0) on the average Nusselt number (Nu), the average Nusselt number ratio (Nu divided by that of a plain tube, Nup), the friction factor ratio (f/fp), and a parameter called the thermal performance factor (η=(Nu/Nup)/(f/fp)1/3) are studied. Different ball diameter (Y=0.3,... 

Regression testing activities greatly reduce the risk of faulty software release. However, the size of the test suites grows throughout the development process, resulting in time-consuming execution of the test suite and delayed feedback to the software development team. This has urged the need for approaches such as test case prioritization (TCP) and test-suite reduction to reach better results in case of limited resources. In this regard, proposing approaches that use auxiliary sources of data such as bug history can be interesting. We aim to propose an approach for TCP that takes into account test case coverage data, bug history, and test case diversification. To evaluate this approach we... 

Medical waste management (MWM) is an important and necessary problem in the COVID-19 situation for treatment staff. When the number of infectious patients grows up, the amount of MWMs increases day by day. We present medical waste chain network design (MWCND) that contains health center (HC), waste segregation (WS), waste purchase contractor (WPC), and landfill. We propose to locate WS to decrease waste and recover them and send them to the WPC. Recovering medical waste like metal and plastic can help the environment and return to the production cycle. Therefore, we proposed a novel viable MWCND by a novel two-stage robust stochastic programming that considers resiliency (flexibility and... 

Nowadays, the construction industry has turned to the consumption of large amounts of natural resources in line with global population growth, which has led to the shortage of resources, and consequently increases in the construction debris; therefore, the present article has studied the positive and negative points of the architectural development process. The results have indicated that being compared to the former architecture; the development of architecture has reduced energy consumption by 78%. Hence, the scarcity of virgin resources and consequently the increase of environmental effects such as Global Warming Potential (GWP) have been measured based on the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA).... 

The rational design of composite catalysts is critically essential for electrochemical water splitting. Here, we report on a novel hierarchical composite that comprises NiFeSe2 nanoparticles and NiCo2O4 nanoflakes supported on nickel foam (NF) as an efficient electrocatalyst for the hydrogen evolution reaction (HER). The conjunction of the NiFeSe2 nanoparticles and NiCo2O4 nanoflakes introduces a new synergistic effect for the HER, resulting in an improved NiCo2O4 catalyst. The as-prepared NiFeSe2/NiCo2O4/NF electrode exhibited an enhanced HER activity, with a low overpotential of 83 mV at a current density of 10 mA cm−2, a low Tafel slope of 45 mV dec−1, and an excellent long-term... 

Intensity-modulated radiation therapy is a well-known technique for treating cancer patients worldwide. A treatment plan in this technique requires decision-making for three main problems: selection of beam angles, intensity map calculation, and leaf sequencing. Previous works investigated these problems sequentially. We present a new integrated framework for simultaneous decision-making of directions, intensities, and aperture shape, called direct angle and aperture optimization, and develop a mixed-integer nonlinear mathematical model for the problem. Due to the nonlinearity and the dimension of the problem, three efficient metaheuristics based on differential evolution (DE) called classic... 

The growth of process industries has escalated the probability of loss containment scenarios of hazardous materials that can be tackled via process safety schemes. For preliminary design stage, the inherent scheme is more promising to generate sustainable process designs. For this purpose, various process routes are typically compared to recognize the safer one via numerous indexing methods to eliminate routes with hazardous materials. However, these indices lack in accommodating the equipment characteristics and the underutilization of process and chemical characteristics. Specifically for chemical characteristics, the toxicity aspect has not been engaged for process route selection in... 

In the presented research, vibrational, and amplitude behaviors of a sandwich spinning disk made of two laminated layers and graphene nanoplatelets reinforced composite (GPLRC) core has been reported. The Coriolis and centrifugal impacts have been taken into account due to its rotational feature. The stresses and strains have been obtained through the high-order shear deformable theory (HSDT). The structure’s boundary conditions (BCs) are determined using laminated rotating disk’s governing equations employing energy methods and ultimately have been solved via a computational approach called generalized differential quadrature method (GDQM). The rotational disk’s vibrations with different... 

In this research, friction stir joining of aluminum-polypropylene/talc composite was investigated due to the numerous applications of aluminum-polymer joints in automotive and aerospace industry. A novel tool design, including a rotary/stationary holder, was used to improve the appearance and mechanical performance of friction stir lap joints by preventing the mixed molten polymer and aluminum particles from exiting the stirred zone. Effect of tool transverse speed on the joint microstructure and strength was investigated. Using the rotary/stationary holder, tensile-shear strength of the joints increased (by ~ 45 to ~ 220% at various transverse speeds). Since during the tensile-shear test... 

So the design and control of an accurate robot for this purpose is very critical for saving the patients. Modification of the model and designing two optimized nonlinear robust controllers for the first time for the parallel manipulator medical robot and cardiopulmonary resuscitation. The main objective of the current study in order to decrease the overshoot and increase the accuracy of the position and convergence speed and robustness to destructive factors affecting the precision of the robot. In this paper firstly, the kinematics and dynamics analysis of a translational parallel manipulator robot is presented and a non-linear model in the presence of uncertainties, disturbances, and... 

The seismic responses of steel water tanks are unconventional given their complex dynamic behavior and the sources of nonlinearity. Therefore, providing a reliable, finite-element model is instrumental in better understanding their dynamic behavior and improving the design conditions. This paper aims to evaluate the seismic performance of steel water tanks using shaking table tests and provide a finite-element reference model for simulating real-size, semi-anchored water tanks by conducting a series of large-scale tests in the Shaking Table Lab of the Sharif University of Technology (SUT). Since scaling the tank requires a difficult process involving changing the liquid density, this paper... 

Despite the seismic vulnerability of non-structural Exterior Infill Walls (EIWs), their resilient design has received minimal attention. This study addresses the issue by proposing a novel framework for predicting possible damage states of EIWs. The framework benefits from an automated combination of Building Information Modeling as a visualized 3D database of the building's components and the Machine Learning classification as the prediction engine. The framework's applicability is studied in a Proof of Concept example of the exterior walls of the buildings damaged in the 2017 earthquake in Kermanshah, Iran. The Extremely Randomized Trees classifier produced the best results for predicting... 

As concerning with water insecurity driven by water scarcity threatens the lives and livelihoods of humanity worldwide, urban water demand management is focused on promoting residential water conservation behaviors (WCBs) as a critical policy response to water scarcity. However, urban water conservation initiatives cannot be successful unless households involve in residential WCBs voluntarily by adopting water curtailment and/or water-efficiency actions. Thus, understanding motivations and mechanisms underlying accepting these two types of WCBs and interpreting their distinctions are primary policy considerations to make sustainable water consumption behaviors. Hence, the purpose of this... 

In this article, we investigate the problem of practical output regulation, i.e., to design a controller that brings the system output in the vicinity of a desired target value while keeping the other variables bounded. We consider uncertain systems that are possibly nonlinear and the uncertainty of their linear parts is modeled element wise through a parametric family of matrix boxes. An optimization-based design procedure is proposed that delivers a continuous-time control and estimates the maximal regulation error. We also analyze an event-triggered emulation of this controller, which can be implemented on a digital platform, along with an explicit estimate of the regulation error. ©... 

To alleviate costly data communication among processing cores and memory modules, parallel processing-in-memory (PIM) is a promising approach which exploits the huge available internal memory bandwidth. High capacity, wide row size, and maturity of DRAM technology, make DRAM an alluring structure for PIM. However, dense layout, high process variation, and noise vulnerability of DRAMs make it very challenging to apply PIM for DRAMs in practice. This work proposes a PIM structure which eliminates these DRAM limitations, exploiting a precharge-free DRAM (PF-DRAM) structure. The proposed PIM structure, called PIPF-DRAM, performs parallel bitwise operations only by modifying control signal... 

Polylactic acid (PLA) scaffolds produced by the fused deposition modeling (FDM) method have biocompatibility, close Young's modulus to that of bone, and the ability to make complex shapes. However, PLA has some drawbacks like brittleness, inappropriate mechanical strength and hydrophobicity, and a low degradation rate. In this study, polyethylene glycol (PEG) (5 and 10 wt%) by solving method and titanium (Ti) particles (5 wt%) by two different methods were mixed with PLA to address the mentioned problems. Extruded filaments were investigated by X-ray diffraction (XRD), differential scanning calorimetry (DSC), and fourier transform infrared (FTIR). Surface morphology of the produced filaments... 

Phase field theory for fracture is developed at large strains with an emphasis on a correct introduction of surface stresses at nanoscale. This is achieved by multiplying the cohesion and gradient energies by the local ratio of the crack surface areas in the deformed and undeformed configurations and with the gradient energy in terms of the gradient of the order parameter in the reference configuration. This results in an expression for the surface stresses which is consistent with the sharp surface approach. Namely, the structural part of the Cauchy surface stress represents an isotropic biaxial tension, with the magnitude of a force per unit length equal to the surface energy. The surface... 

An autonomous hedge trimmer robot was developed to reduce the harmful effects of traditional hedge trimming method (gasoline-powered hedge trimmer) on operators' bodies and increase the speed and quality of the operation. The robot had five degrees of freedom (PRRRR) structure and was geometrically optimized to simplify the control strategy, enabling it to trim simple, stepped, and circular forms. The control system, consisting of a host computer, servo motors and servo drivers, and controller, guided the robot platform, manipulator, and end-effector as it approached and trimmed the hedge. By using a recognition algorithm and vision-based navigation system, the robot was able to detect the... 

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are at the heart of several machine learning applications, while they suffer from computational complexity due to their large number of parameters and operations. Recently, all-optical implementation of the CNNs has achieved many attentions, however, the recently proposed optical architectures for CNNs cannot fully utilize the tremendous capabilities of optical processing, due to the required electro-optical conversions in-between successive layers. To implement an all-optical multi-layer CNN, it is essential to optically implement all required operations, namely convolution, summation of channels' output for each convolutional kernel feeding the... 

We prove that the inner products of spherical s-distance t-designs with t≥2s−2 (Delsarte codes) and s≥3 are rational with the only exception being the icosahedron. In other formulations, we prove that all sharp configurations have rational inner products and all spherical codes which attain the Levenshtein bound, have rational inner products, except for the icosahedron. © 2022 Elsevier Inc