Sharif Digital Repository

Wind and ocean waves highly influence the performance and functionality of structures, requiring an efficient control element. The structural behavior of one of the most recent structural control elements, namely shape memory alloys (SMA)-based control element, under cyclic loadings of oceans waves, has been investigated. Shape memory alloys are one of the attractive smart materials with the ability to return to the initial shape after experiencing large deformation. Experimental tests have been conducted to study the effects of cyclic loads on several specimens of the SMA wires. The SMA wires are being used in the SMA-based structural control system to dissipate the energy of external... 

Dynamic environmental loads, such as winds and waves, make the stability of offshore structures at high risk, requiring reliable yet efficient control elements to ensure the stability of such structures under lateral loads. Among the variety of control elements that have been developed to enhance the stability of a structure, shape memory alloy (SMA)-based control elements are promising as they are low-cost, easy to embed into the main control element, and do not need an external power supply. However, cyclic loads may highly influence the performance and functionality of SMA-based elements. The present work investigates the effects of pre-straining SMA components in energy dissipation... 

In the present work, the multivariate kinetic complexation of a new synthesized ligand, 1-(2″-hydroxyl cyclohexyl)-3′-[aminopropyl]-4-[3′-aminopropyl]piperazine (Pizda) and Cu2+ in 50% ethanol-water solution is investigated using the UV-vis stopped-flow technique and state-of-the-art multi-wavelength numerical analysis. Model-based least squares fitting analysis or hard modeling is a specific part of chemometrics which is based on mathematical relationships for describing the measurements. Some recent developments include the incorporation of the effects of non-ideal experimental conditions into the fitting algorithm so it can substantially simplify experimental procedures. In this study no... 

An incompressible smoothed particle hydrodynamics (I-SPH) formulation is presented to simulate free surface incompressible fluid problems. The governing equations are mass and momentum conservation that are solved in a Lagrangian form using a two-step fractional method. In the first step, velocity field is computed without enforcing incompressibility. In the second step, a Poisson equation of pressure is used to satisfy incompressibility condition. The source term in the Poisson equation for the pressure is approximated, based on the SPH continuity equation, by an interpolation summation involving the relative velocities between a reference particle and its neighboring particles. A new form... 

In this second part of the two companion papers an effective numerical model is proposed using finite element method to simulate the push-out test of channel shear connectors. The focus is on the shear capacity of channel shear connectors embedded in a solid reinforced concrete slab under monotonic loading. The model has been validated against test results presented in Part (I) and compared with data given in North American design codes. Parametric studies using this nonlinear model are performed to investigate the variations in concrete strength, channel dimensions and the orientation of the channel. The results show that the concrete strength, web and flange thicknesses of the channel and... 

Waveform design for Target identification and classification in MIMO radar systems has been studied in several recent works. While the previous works considered signal independent noise and found optimal signals, here we extend the results to the case where clutter is also present and then we will find the optimum waveform for MMSE estimator. Choosing optimal waveform for MMSE estimator leads to the Semidefinite programming (SDP) problem, a convex optimization problem which can be efficiently solved through numerical methods. Explicit solution is developed for this SDP problem in two cases .In the first case, target and clutter covariance matrices are jointly diagonalizable and in the second... 

In this paper, joint dynamic frequency selection and transmit power control problem with the goal of power minimization for a target SINR is investigated for cognitive radio networks. The optimization problem is formulated and three algorithms are proposed: A centralized algorithm based on graph coloring, and two distributed algorithms based on game theory; one for coordinated and the other for non-coordinated scenarios. Performance of the proposed algorithms in terms of power minimization and convergence speed is evaluated through simulations. Comparing the performance with the optimum solution, all three algorithms show near-optimum power minimization performance for the simulated... 

Rational functions for approximation of the admittance matrix elements of a linear power system/component are used to increase the computational efficiency for the analysis of electromagnetic transients. The challenge in this regard is passivity enforcement of the resultant model to guarantee numerical stability of the analyses. The main cause of passivity violation of the equivalent model of a passive system/ component, in a specific frequency region, is the selection of unsuitable and/or insufficient number of frequency samples for fitting. The more severe the passivity violations are, the more effort is required to enforce passivity. This paper presents an adaptive sampling technique for... 

In this work, the conservation forms of the reacting ow governing equations are treated mainly using a cell-centered finite-volume approach with a collocated storage of all trans- port variables. However, the finite volume formulations are suitably incorporated with the finite element expressions. As an innovation, a physical influence upwinding scheme is suitably extended to the cylindrical coordinate system to approximate the convective terms of the governing conservation laws at the cell faces. This treatment firstly respects the physics of flow and secondly provides the necessary coupling of velocity and pressure fields in this frame. The numerical solution of laminar, buoyant difiusion... 

Monitoring and controlling the depth of anesthesia is really important, since over dosing and under dosing can be dangerous for the patients. Pharmacokinetic-Pharmacodynamic models vastly used for describing the relationship between input anesthetic agents and output patient endpoint variables. As there is a large variety between the patients so for controlling the depth of anesthesia we need a controller which should be robust enough and also because the anesthesia process is nonlinear and contains time delay, among them all the proposed methods for controlling the depth of anesthesia, model predictive controllers (MPCs) are good choices. Extended dynamic matrix control (EDMC) can be... 

A new meshless method called gradient reproducing kernel particle method (GRKPM) is proposed for numerical solutions of one-dimensional Burgers' equation with various values of viscosity and different initial and boundary conditions. Discretization is first done in the space via GRKPM, and subsequently, the reduced system of nonlinear ordinary differential equations is discretized in time by the Gear's method. Comparison with the exact solutions, which are only available for restricted initial conditions and values of viscosity, approves the efficacy of the proposed method. For challenging cases involving small viscosities, comparison with the results obtained using other numerical schemes... 

In this paper effects of material properties estimations, used for particulate reinforced composites, on the thermo-mechanical response of functionally graded sphere and cylinder are presented. A numerical solution for an arbitrary material gradation is obtained for each geometry independently. With this assumption, the governing partial differential equations are reduced to an ordinary differential equation in each geometry. The thermo-elastic solution for hollow sphere is derived using spherical symmetry. However, plane strain and axial symmetry are assumed for solving hollow cylinder. In the numerical method, radial domain is divided into some finite sub-domains and material properties... 

In this work, a finite-volume-element method1-4 is suitably extended to simulate the rarefied gas flow in lid-driven cavities with different height to width ratios. The flow conditions are chosen in a manner to cover the free molecular transition regime to the continuum one. As the hydrodynamic diameter of a driven cavity becomes comparable with the mean free path of the gas molecules in the cavity, the flow can no longer be considered as being in thermodynamic equilibrium; hence, a variety of non-equilibrium or rarefaction effects emerge. In this study, we show that the non-equilibrium effects in lid-driven cavity can be encountered and they become more serious in lower Knudsen numbers. We... 

This paper presents a new approach for unit commitment (UC); where a large scale wind power exists and the wind speed has a fuzzy characteristic; by using particle swarm optimization method (PSO). In this approach, the system reserve requirements, the requirement of having a load balance, and the wind power availability constraints are realized. A proper modeling of these constraints is an important issue in power system scheduling. Since these constraints are "fuzzy" in nature, any crisp treatment of them in this problem may lead to over conservative solutions. In this paper, a fuzzy optimization-based method is developed to solve power system UC problem with a fuzzy objective function and... 

In the realization of adaptive beamforming algorithms, the least-mean-squares (LMS) algorithm had been the most popular scheme used for Smart Antenna systems. This Paper proposes an alternate scheme in the form of the Normalized LMS (NLMS) algorithm with active tap detection for WCDMA systems. By taking advantage of spatial filtering, the proposed scheme promises to reduce the bandwidth required for transmitting data by improving convergence rate. The performance of the Frequency Domain NLMS algorithm in the presence of multipath effects and multiple users is analyzed using simulations. This analysis is compared to that of LMS algorithm and suggests improvement in the convergence rate and... 

In this paper the development of a quasi-three-dimensional numerical model that can be used for quantifying groundwater inputs and associated contaminant discharged from coastal aquifers into the coastal zone at a regional scale is presented. The present model is called MODSharp. In order to handle problems at a regional scale, the sharp interface approach which is used for conceptualising seawater intrusion, is applied to this model. This model can be used for the simulation of groundwater flow and contaminant transport in layered coastal aquifers at a regional scale. The method of characteristics is used to solve the advection-dispersion equation, which governs contaminant transport in... 

This paper presents and utilizes an Improved Particle Swarm Optimization algorithm (IPSO) for reactive power management in restructured power systems. Reactive power procurement is modeled as a Security Constraint Optimal Power Flow (SCOPF), which incorporates a voltage stability problem. This is a major concern in power system control and operation. The model attempts to minimize the cost of reactive power procurement and energy losses as a main objective, while the technical criteria and voltage stability margin, especially, are treated as soft constraints. From a mathematical point of view, the reactive power market can be expressed as a nonlinear non-convex optimization problem with... 

Usually the digital phase shifters are used to steer the beam of a phased array antenna, and the accuracy of beam steering and other properties of the radiation pattern is dependent on the number of bits of the phase shifter and its resolution. In this paper the results of simulations, accomplished using a number of phase feeding methods in order to reduce the phase quantization error effects are presented and three new methods are introduced and compared with the previous works. Copyright 2006 IEICE  

In our investigation, the model of optimal energy flow in a passenger vehicle has been founded on the theory of firm microeconomics. Based on this theory, the car owner tries to minimize the total cost of the system (including the cost of time of the traveller) subject to the satisfaction of the required transport services and technological, economical, environmental and institutional constraints. The aforementioned model has been developed using a technique of mathematical programming. The model depicts the behaviour of a nonlinear system and it includes many nonlinear functions in the objective function and in the constraints. Solving the large nonlinear set of constraints and identifying... 

Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithms recently invented as intelligent optimizers with several highly desirable attributes. In this paper, two new hybrid Particle Swam Optimization schemes are proposed. The proposed hybrid algorithms are based on using the Particle Swarm Optimization techniques in conjunction with the Simulated Annealing (SA) approach. By simulating three different test functions, it is shown how the proposed hybrid algorithms offer the capability of converging toward the global minimum or maximum points. More importantly, the simulation results indicate that the proposed hybrid particle swarm-based simulated annealing approaches have much superior convergence...