Sharif Digital Repository

The size of the rock specimen affects the stress concentrates in the vicinity of the top/bottom of the rock specimen during the evaluation of the geomechanical parameters in the laboratory, which causes unreliable results. However, the appropriate size for geomechanical evaluation is not well understood yet because of limitations in the sampling and analysis. In this study, a series of numerical simulations using a finite element package was conducted to investigate the effect of sample aspect ratio, fluid saturation, and porosity, on the mechanical behavior of the rock under elastic and poroelastic conditions. In addition, two concepts, stress/strain homogeneity index (SHI) and... 

The current design procedure known as Force-Based Design (FBD) method, generally, does not lead to uniform distribution of drift, hysteretic energy, and ductility demands (or structural damage) along the height of the moment frames under strong earthquakes and these performance parameters can be much higher and concentrate damage on one or more of the lower structural stories. This paper presents an iterative wave propagation (WP) based technique to calculate the seismic nonlinear response of multistory buildings as an extension of the layered soil media, founded on bedrock and subjected to vertically propagating shear waves, which leads to the introduction of a new Lateral Load Pattern... 

The present study demonstrates numerically a novel approach to perform a controllable single-mode random laser, using stimulated Raman gain. Due to the narrow linewidth of the Raman line shape, only one of the modes of the passive random system can lase. The robust control on the emission spectrum was achieved through the selection of any desired quasi-modes, by adjusting the pump wavelength in order to place the center of Raman line shape on desired quasi-modes. This approach was proved using a developed nonlinear transfer matrix method for a 1D Raman random system. The proposed method includes the Raman gain saturation and the frequency-dependent index of refraction  

In [1], [2] it is shown that the minimum broadcast rate of a linear index code over a finite field Fq is equal to an algebraic invariant of the underlying digraph, called minrankq. In [3], it is proved that for F2 and any positive integer k, minrankq(G) ≤ k if and only if there exists a homomorphism from the complement of the graph G to the complement of a particular undirected graph family called 'graph family {Gk}'. As observed in [2], by combining these two results one can relate the linear index coding problem of undirected graphs to the graph homomorphism problem. In [4], a direct connection between linear index coding problem and graph homomorphism problem is introduced. In contrast to... 

Iran is a country in a dry part of the world and extensively suffers from drought. Drought is a natural, temporary, and iterative phenomenon that is caused by shortage in rainfall, which affects people's health and well-being adversely as well as impacting the society's economy and politics with far-reaching consequences. Information on intensity, duration, and spatial coverage of drought can help decision makers to reduce the vulnerability of the drought-affected areas, and therefore, lessen the risks associated with drought episodes. One of the major challenges of modeling drought (and short-term forecasting) in Iran is unavailability of long-term meteorological data for many parts of the... 

Metal films with a periodic arrangement of cut-through slits are studied to show that artificial surface conductivity is created at the flat interface between the periodic slits and the cover/substrate. The presence of surface conductivity when the periodic structure is modeled by an effective refractive index can describe how non-specular higher diffracted orders affect the specular zeroth diffracted order. The magnitude of this surface conductivity is controlled geometrically. The artificial surface conductivity is pure imaginary and thus reactive if all non-specular orders are evanescent. This is usually the case in the low frequency regime. At higher working frequencies when some... 

Reactive market power assessment is an important issue for ISOs and the regulators of the reactive power market. Due to the localized characteristics of reactive power as a technical support and its monopsonistic nature as an economic commodity, a vivid reactive market power index including market share, demand side and cost is not achieved yet. In this paper, a new reactive market power index is presented which is based on bidding strategy deviation of the GENCOs after establishing a uniform price auction reactive market. Not knowing others' offers to ISO, each unit faces a bidding strategy problem that is solved using game theory. Considering its production costs, the unit uses the... 

Dynamic Index coding as a generalization of the traditional index coding problem, deals with transmission of some dynamic data flows in the presence of side information. For a dynamic index coding system, the set of average flow rates for which the system can be stable is named Code-Constraint Capacity region. In this paper, we identify the code-constraint capacity region for a dynamic index coding problem with complete bi-directional side information graph. Furthermore, we introduce the concept of Dynamic Index Coding Gain to quantify the improvement resulted from the dynamic index coding with respect to uncoded transmissions. We also provide some corollaries about system performance... 

Lab-on-a-chip (LOC) systems have been widely used in chemical and medical analyses. In this study, a novel T-shaped electroosmotic micromixer was simulated and the effects of different parameters on the mixing process were examined. These parameters include; inlet angle, number of conducting hurdles, arrangements of the hurdles, geometry of hurdles and chambers, aspect ratios of the channel cross-sectional profile, hurdle radius, and depth. It was found that the inlet angle has a direct influence on mixing index (σ). The effect of various number of hurdles (one, two, three and four hurdles) and their orientations was investigated. Simulations revealed that using two conducting hurdles is the... 

The proliferation of more sensitive loads has obliged distribution companies to pay greater attention to the voltage sag mitigation potential of different design alternatives in network planning studies. In doing so, a company has to have effective tools for estimating the voltage sag performance of its network. In this regard, this paper establishes a three-step framework for evaluating voltage sag performance of a distribution network. The first step, designated as state selection, is to select a network state in which voltage sag is likely. Although voltage sags have various causes, those that originated from faults in distribution networks are considered in this paper. The stochastic... 

Finding the optimal location for sensors is a key problem in flow estimation. There are several location models that have been developed recently for vehicle identification (ID) sensors. However, these location models cannot be applied to large networks because there are many constraints and integer variables. Based on a property of the location problem for vehicle ID sensors, given the initial vehicle ID sensors that are pre-installed and fixed on the network, this article presents a solution that greatly reduces the size of this location problem. An applied example demonstrates that when 8% of the arcs from a real network that are randomly selected have a vehicle ID sensor, the reductions... 

Tunability of the Fermi level of graphene is exploited to implement a plasmonic nano-color-sorter for scanning near-field optical microscope (SNOM) applications capable of handling large tip sample couplings. Nano-color-sorting has been used in SNOM through creating multiple spatially separated hot spots for different incident wavelengths. We show that in the presence of high-refractive-index samples an unwanted redshift in the spectral response of the dual-color probe occurs. This limitation can be compensated for using graphene and adjusting its chemical potential to obtain a blueshift in probe spectral response. The Method of Moments analysis technique is employed to engineer the probe... 

Due to environmental and economic advantages, cold mix asphalt (CMA) can be considered as a good alternative to conventional hot mix asphalt (HMA). Nevertheless, it has inferior performance compared to HMA, so that the application of CMA is not recommended in the surface layer of pavements subjected to high traffic volume and/or regions with very cold or hot climate. Considering the high potential of distress occurring in the CMAs, this research is aimed at investigating the effect of crumb rubber (CR) on fracture and moisture damage resistance of the CMAs. Different CR percentages were applied through two different modification methods and, then by means of Semi-Circular Bending (SCB) test,...