Sharif Digital Repository

Energy infrastructures are perceived continuously vulnerable to a range of high-impact low-probability (HILP) incidents - e.g., earthquakes, tsunamis, floods, windstorms, etc. - the resilience to which is highly on demand. Specifically suited to battery energy storage system (BESS) solutions, this paper presents a new resilience-driven framework for hardening power distribution systems against earthquakes. The concept of fragility curve is applied to characterize an earthquake hazard, assess its impact on power distribution systems, and estimate the unavailability of the network elements when exposed to extreme earthquakes. A new metric is defined to quantify the network resilience taking... 

We propose a lightweight scheme where the formation of a data block is changed in such a way that it can tolerate soft errors significantly better than the baseline. The key insight behind our work is that CNN weights are normalized between -1 and 1 after each convolutional layer, and this leaves one bit unused in half-precision floating-point representation. By taking advantage of the unused bit, we create a backup for the most significant bit to protect it against the soft errors. Also, considering the fact that in MLC STT-RAMs the cost of memory operations (read and write), and reliability of a cell are content-dependent (some patterns take larger current and longer time, while they are... 

Compression test was used to study the deformation behaviour of sintered (12% porosity) and powder extruded (1% porosity) Al6061 alloy at high temperatures ranging from 350 to 500°C. The flow curves of the materials were determined at strain rates of 0.001, 0.01 and 0.1 s-1. The extruded alloy exhibited plastic instability in the form of bulging and formation of shear bands. The deformation activation energy of the extruded material was determined to be QI=77±16 kJ mol-1 (T<450°C) and OII=136±12 kJ mol-1 (T≥450°C). The values of activation energy and appearance of strain softening in the stress-strain curves revealed that thermally activated restoration processes, i.e. dynamic recovery and... 

In the present work, an artificial neural network (ANN) model was developed for predicting the effect of thermo-mechanical processing on the forming limit diagram (FLD) of low carbon steels. The model introduced here considers the content of carbon, the hot finishing temperature, the degree of cold work, the work hardening exponent, the initial yield stress and the ASTM grain size as inputs; while, the predicted FLDs are presented as outputs. The results show that the predicted FLDs by the ANN model are very accurate exhibiting the maximum error of 9% over the whole strain region. The model predicted that with increasing the degree of cold rolling before annealing, the drawability is... 

In order to optimize the aging treatment of Mg-1.8Zn-0.7Si-0.4Ca alloy, different times and temperatures of solid solution and age hardening were applied to the alloy specimens. Microstructures and mechanical properties of the specimens were investigated using the optical microscopy, field emission scanning electron microscopy equipped with an energy dispersive x-ray spectrometer, x-ray diffraction, hardness, and shear punch tests. The lowest hardness and strength were achieved by solution treating of the alloy at 500 °C for 8 h, presenting the optimal condition for solution treatment of the alloy. The microstructural examinations revealed three different precipitates consisting of CaMgSi,... 

Assessing the durability of concrete is of prime importance to provide an adequate service life and reduce the repairing cost of structures. Freeze-thaw is one such test that indicates the ability of concrete to last a long time without a significant loss in its performance. In this study, the freeze-thaw resistance of polymer concrete containing different polymer contents was explored and compared to various conventional cement concretes. Concretes’ fresh and hardened properties were assessed for their workability, air content, and compressive strength. The mass loss, length change, dynamic modulus of elasticity, and residual compressive strength were determined for all types of concretes... 

In order to examine the impact of structural and thermal scale parameters on thermoelastic vibrations of Euler-Bernoulli nanobeams, this article intends to provide a size-dependent generalized thermoelasticity model with the help of nonlocal strain gradient theory (NSGT) in conjunction with dual-phase-lag (DPL) heat conduction model. To highlight the role of each scale parameter in size-dependent motion and heat conduction equations, normalized forms of these nonclassical coupled thermoelastic equations are extracted by introducing and exploiting some dimensionless parameters. By exploiting power series expansion as a general solution for arbitrary boundary conditions, system of partial... 

The tribological behaviors of an AISI 4340 ferritic-bainitic dual-phase steel with different bainite (VB) content were investigated. The effects of VB on wear resistance and the corresponding wear mechanisms were investigated using a pin-on-disk wear testing machine, at normal loads of 10 and 50 N, at a constant sliding velocity. The tensile and hardness tests showed that the yield strength, ultimate tensile strength, and hardness increased with increasing the VB. The wear test results at the 10 N normal load showed a direct correlation between the tensile and tribological behavior of the samples. Nevertheless, at the normal load of 50 N, unexpected behavior was observed due to the carbon... 

A modified two-surface critical state plasticity model for saturated and unsaturated soil is presented in this study. The key modification in new model is inclusion of an alternative yield surface used to simulate the behavior of unsaturated soils in addition to corresponding saturated conditions. Moreover, a numerical technique is used to obtain an incremental stress–strain response from loading curves. Modification is applied continuously in each incremental step to return the final stress states and hardening parameters to the yield surface. Results revealed that the adopted modeling approach can predict two independent sets of laboratory unsaturated experiments under various conditions... 

In this study, a pulsed Nd:YAG laser welding method is implemented to join Ti-G2 (1 mm thick) to AA3105-O (0.5 mm thick) via a ring of spots filled with AlScZr alloy (0.15 mm thick). The filler material improved the weld’s microstructure and mechanical properties by reducing the undesirable intermetallic compounds (IMCs) such as TiAl2 and TiAl3 in the aluminium re-solidified zone near the titanium/aluminium interface. The joints having AlScZr filler were mostly failed at Al heat affected zone (HAZ) during the tensile shear test. The addition of zirconium to binary Al–Sc system formed a substitutional solid-solution in which 50 wt% Zr+10 wt% Ti replaced Al3(Sc,Zr,Ti). Scandium had a... 

This study investigates the effect of cold rolling prior to inter-critical annealing on microstructure and mechanical properties of ferrite-martensite dual phase steel. Samples were heated to 850 °C for 1 h followed by oil quenching, then the steel sheet were cold rolled by 0%,10%,15% and 20% reduction in thickness. The inter-critical annealing treatment (750 °C, 120min) was performed to generate a ferrite-martensite microstructure. Microstructural studies showed that increasing the applied cold rolling, leading to increase in volume fraction of martensite and decrease in ferrite grain size. Mechanical properties of dual phase steel were measured by tensile, impact and hardness tests.... 

Rod-shaped samples of maraging steel were additively fabricated in vertical and horizontal directions using laser powder bed fusion technique. The samples were first aged at 490 °C for 6 h and then subjected to dynamic compressive tests using Split Hopkinson Pressure Bar apparatus. The dynamic compression tests were conducted on vertical samples at strain rates of 190, 460, 810, 1100, 1300 s−1. However, the high strain rate tests were performed at strain rates of 120, 615, 745, 890, 2200 s−1 on horizontal samples. After applying the compressive impact loads on the samples, it was found that although horizontally built samples exhibit higher dynamic strength, vertically built samples show... 

In this article, a constitutive model in the framework of continuum damage mechanics is proposed to simulate the elastic behavior of concrete in tension and compression states. We assume two parts for Gibbs potential energy function: elastic and damage parts. In order to obtain the elastic-damage constitutive relation with the internal variables, two damage thermodynamic release rates in tension and compression derived from the elastic part of Gibbs potential energy are introduced. Also, two anisotropic damage tensors (tension and compression) are defined which characterize the tensile and compressive behaviors of concrete. Furthermore, two different linear hardening rules for tension and... 

Reinforcement of styrene-butadiene-rubber (SBR) was investigated using two different carbon blacks (CBs) with similar particle sizes, including highly structured CB and conventional CB, as well as multi-walled carbon nanotube (MWCNT) prepared by mechanical mixing. The attempts were made to examine reinforcing mechanism of these two different classes of carbon nanoparticles. Scanning electron microscopy and electrical conductivity measurement were used to investigate morphology. Tensile, cyclic tensile and stress relaxation analyses were performed. A modified Halpin-Tsai model based on the concept of an equivalent composite particle, consisting of rubber bound, occluded rubber and... 

Uniaxial compression test at different temperatures [573 K to 723 K (300 °C to 450 °C)] and strain rates (0.01 to 1 s−1) was employed to study the hot deformation behavior of an ultrafine-grained (UFG) Al6063 alloy prepared by the powder metallurgy route. The UFG alloy with an average grain size of ~0.3 µm was prepared by mechanical milling of a gas-atomized aluminum alloy powder for 20 hours followed by hot powder extrusion at 723 K (450 °C). To elaborate the effect of grain size, the aluminum alloy powder was extruded without mechanical milling to attain a coarse-grained (CG) structure with an average grain size of about 2.2 µm. By employing the dynamic materials model, processing maps for... 

In this work, thermo-mechanical behavior of an aluminum alloy during gas tungsten arc welding (GTAW) is studied using a three-dimensional mathematical model. The model can be employed to determine residual stresses and their distribution after the welding operation. The effects of the strain hardening and the temperature dependency of material properties have also been considered in the calculations. Model validation has been performed using experimental measurements of residual stress by means of hole-drilling technique. The measurements have been carried out at the heat affected zone (HAZ) and base metal next to the welding line. In addition, microstructural observations have been made to... 

The influence of Cu addition on the hot deformation behavior of NiTi shape memory alloys was investigated using hot compression test. A series of alloys with different Cu contents of Ti50.4Ni49.6-xCux (x = 0, 3, 5, 7 at.%) were deformed under compression to a true strain of 0.7 at the temperature range of 700-1000 °C with 100 °C intervals and constant strain rate of 0.1 s-1. The stress-strain curves showed that the addition of Cu to NiTi alloy made the flow curves shift upward. This was confirmed by the calculated critical stress, σc, obtained from inflections in θ-σ plots, which is attributed to the formation of high strength Cu containing precipitates and solid solution hardening caused by... 

Metal forming processes are widely used in industrial productions, automobile bodies, food industries, oil refineries, and liquid and gas transmission systems. Analyzing these processes is very important to reduce wastes and optimize the processes. Study of some main factors such as physical and mechanical properties of material and its formability, die geometry, die material, lubrication and pressing speed has been the topic of many research projects. In this paper, forming limit diagrams (FLDs) for LC and ULC steels and the effect of different parameters like the work-hardening exponent, n, and the plastic strain ratio, r, on these diagrams have been evaluated and simulated using... 

Alumina dispersion-strengthened copper was produced by an internal oxidation process and hot powder extrusion method. The microstructure of the composite consisted of fine-grained region with an average grain size of 1.1 ± 0.1 μm, coarse-grained region with an average grain size of 5.6 ± 0.1 μm, nanometric alumina particles (γ-type) with an average diameter of 30 nm, and coarse alumina particles (350 nm) at the boundaries of the large grains. The tensile and fatigue fracture of the composite was studied in the extruded condition and after 11% cold working. The low cycle fatigue behavior was examined in strain control mode (ε = 0.5%) under fully reverse tension-compression cycle at 1 Hz up to... 

Due to the increasingly serious environmental problems presented by waste tires, the feasibility of using elastic and flexible tire-rubber particles as aggregate in concrete is investigated in this study. Tire-rubber particles composed of tire chips, crumb rubber, and a combination of tire chips and crumb rubber, were used to replace mineral aggregates in concrete. These particles were used to replace 12.5%, 25%, 37.5%, and 50% of the total mineral aggregate's volume in concrete. Cylindrical shape concrete specimens 15 cm in diameter and 30 cm in height were fabricated and cured. The fresh rubberized concrete exhibited lower unit weight and acceptable workability compared to plain concrete....