Sharif Digital Repository

To characterize the role of specimen disturbance and structure in the hydromechanical behavior of collapsible soils, two sets of wetting-induced collapse and suction-controlled triaxial tests were conducted on intact and reconstituted specimens of a loessial soil taken from a loess deposit in Gorgan, a city in the northeastern Golestan province of Iran. The testing approach used an advanced triaxial testing device that was specifically modified to control pressures applied to a soil specimen and to monitor and measure the amount of changes in volume and water content of the soil specimens during testing using highly sensitive digital sensors with an accuracy of 60.01 cm3. Results of the... 

Collapsible soils such as loess are particular types of problematic soils, whose collapse potential have caused severe damages to the buildings and structures. Loess is susceptible to large and sudden volume reduction upon wetting in constant normal stress or upon increasing normal stress in constant water content or a combination of these two stress paths. In this research both of these collapse induced paths: wetting and stress paths are investigated on undisturbed specimens of a Loess to observe the effect of various parameters on the collapse behavior of the tested soil., Seven controlled matric suction unsaturated oedometer tests have been conducted on undisturbed specimens taken from... 

Standard Penetration Test (SPT) is the most commonly used insitu test for soil characterization, including the liquefaction resistance. Many studies have sought to correlate SPT number to cyclic resistance ratio (CRR) as a frequently-used approach for assessment of liquefaction potential. However, it has been shown that SPT has major deficiencies (e.g., inaccuracy in coarse sands and clays) which have given rise to development and utilization of new characterization methods such as geophysical tests (e.g., down-hole and cross-hole). In this paper, a comparison is made between the results of SPT and geophysical tests in three boreholes through the body and foundation of Mahabad Dam (located... 

Karst features have caused serious problems in many engineering projects because of their permeability and high leakage potential; a clear example is Lar Dam, 84 km northeast of Tehran in which normal water level has never been reached since the filling of its reservoir in 1980. Sometimes conventional methods of studying karst features (e.g., borings and sampling) fail to precisely reveal their underground structure and this may result in inaccurate design, extensive leakage and creation of sinkholes. In the present paper, an under-study dam site in Lajamgir, Zanjan province, northern Iran is investigated. Ground observations indicated the possibility of presence of Karst caves while borings... 

A conventional triaxial test device was modified to characterize the hydro-mechanical behavior of a loessial soil during isotropic and shear loadings. This device is capable of precise and continuous measurements of water outflow during the application of loading. The tests were performed on "undisturbed" cylindrical specimens, which were taken from loessial deposits in Gorgan, a city in the northeast of Iran. Experimental measurements indicate that the hydro-mechanical behavior of loess is highly affected by the extent of applied mean net stress and the level of suction. During both isotropic and shearing stages of loading, the tested specimens may exhibit collapse, abrupt decrease in... 

Hydro-mechanical behavior of unsaturated collapsible soils can be drastically affected by saline infiltrations. Saline infiltrations into the underlain soil layers of the urban transportation and lifelines due to deicing or existence of traffic pollutants has been a common issue of concern for years in many countries. Additionally, many reports have been published so far, indicating the construction of roads and railways on unsaturated collapsible soils. In this research, hydro-mechanical characteristics of an unsaturated collapsible loessial soil diluted with saturated solutions of three different salts that are frequently involved in transportation infrastructure (namely NaCl, CaCl2 and... 

Highly collapsible loessial soils are characterized by an open void structure that can experience significant settlement upon loading. In the field, these partially saturated Aeolian deposits are particularly susceptible to wetting-induced collapse. Due to difficulties in preparing undisturbed specimens from highly collapsible soils, previous studies have generally performed laboratory tests on reconstituted specimens with different water contents and densities, and the effect of disturbance on the initial state of the soil was ignored. Disturbance in highly collapsible soil specimens may significantly affect the natural composition of the soil matrix, the non-homogeneous distribution of... 

Heat curing was devised in temperature-controlled steam and water environments to synthesize reverse osmosis (RO) polyamide (PA) membrane. The effect of new curing media on the physicochemical properties and RO performance of the synthesized polyamides was fully investigated using X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS), attenuated total reflection infrared (ATR-IR), scanning electron microscopy (SEM), atomic force microscopy (AFM), and water drop contact angle. The results show a reduction in amide linkage content on the surface of the steam-cured polyamide and surface and bulk of the water-cured polyamide. Additionally, it was revealed that heat curing in the humidity-controlled environment... 

Porphyrins are organic compounds that continue to attract much theoretical interest, and have been called the “pigments of life”. They have a wide role in photodynamic and sonodynamic therapy, along with uses in magnetic resonance, fluorescence and photoacoustic imaging. There is a vast range of porphyrins that have been isolated or designed, but few of them have real clinical applications. Due to the hydrophobic properties of porphyrins, and their tendency to aggregate by stacking of the planar molecules they are difficult to work with in aqueous media. Therefore encapsulating them in nanoparticles (NPs) or attachment to various delivery vehicles have been used to improve delivery... 

The stability of unsaturated slopes under seismic loading has become an important issue over the past few years which is the indication of its practical significance in geoengineering. This study aims at exploring the seismic stability of unsaturated sandy clay and silty clayey sand slopes using 2D limit equilibrium analysis for different slope geometries and ground water levels. To this end, the pseudo-static and the displacement-based sliding block Newmark’s approaches are employed for parametric studies by considering the records of the 2003 earthquake that devastated the city of Bam, in the southeast of Iran. In all analyses, the unsaturated state of the soil materials is taken into... 

Let S⊆C*=C{0} and A∈Mn(C). The matrix A is called an S-GHMn if A∈Mn(S) and AA*=Diag(λ1,... λn), for some positive numbers λi, i=1,... n. In this paper we provide some necessary conditions on n for the existence of an S-GHMn over a finite set S. We conjecture that for every positive integer n, there exists a {±1, ±2, ±3}-GHMn  

The zero-divisor graph of a ring R is defined as the directed graph Γ (R) that its vertices are all non-zero zero-divisors of R in which for any two distinct vertices x and y, x → y is an edge if and only if x y = 0. Recently, it has been shown that for any finite ring R, Γ (R) has an even number of edges. Here we give a simple proof for this result. In this paper we investigate some properties of zero-divisor graphs of matrix rings and group rings. Among other results, we prove that for any two finite commutative rings R, S with identity and n, m ≥ 2, if Γ (Mn (R)) ≃ Γ (Mm (S)), then n = m, | R | = | S |, and Γ (R) ≃ Γ (S). © 2007 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved  

We say that two graphs G and H with the same vertex set commute if their adjacency matrices commute. In this article, we show that for any natural number r, the complete multigraph Knr is decomposable into commuting perfect matchings if and only if n is a 2-power. Also, it is shown that the complete graph Kn is decomposable into commuting Hamilton cycles if and only if n is a prime number. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc  

Let G be a graph. A spanning subgraph of G is called a {1, 2}-factor if each of its components is a regular graph of degree one or two. In this paper we provide a short proof of a theorem of Tutte which says that a graph G has a {1, 2}-factor if and only if i(GS) ≤ |S| for any S ⊆ V(G), where i(GS) denotes the number of isolated vertices of GS  

A multicolored tree is a tree whose edges have different colors. Brualdi and Hollingsworth [5] proved in any proper edge coloring of the complete graph K2n(n > 2) with 2n -1 colors, there are two edge-disjoint multicolored spanning trees. In this paper we generalize this result showing that if (a1,..., ak) is a color distribution for the complete graph Kn, n ≥ 5, such that 2 ≤ a1 ≤ a2 ≤ ⋯ ≤ ak ≤ (n + 1)/2, then there exist two edge-disjoint multicolored spanning trees. Moreover, we prove that for any edge coloring of the complete graph Kn with the above distribution if T is a non-star multicolored spanning tree of Kn, then there exists a multicolored spanning tree T′ of Kn such that T and T′... 

In a manner analogous to the commutative case, the zero-divisor graph of a non-commutative ring R can be defined as the directed graph Γ (R) that its vertices are all non-zero zero-divisors of R in which for any two distinct vertices x and y, x → y is an edge if and only if xy = 0. We investigate the interplay between the ring-theoretic properties of R and the graph-theoretic properties of Γ (R). In this paper it is shown that, with finitely many exceptions, if R is a ring and S is a finite semisimple ring which is not a field and Γ (R) ≃ Γ (S), then R ≃ S. For any finite field F and each integer n ≥ 2, we prove that if R is a ring and Γ (R) ≃ Γ (Mn), then R ≃ Mnn. Redmond defined the simple...