Sharif Digital Repository

A new concept to determine state of the damage in concrete gravity dams is introduced. The Pine Flat concrete gravity dam has been selected for the purpose of the analysis and its structural capacity, assuming no sliding plane and rigid foundation, has been estimated using the two well-known methods: nonlinear static pushover (SPO) and incremental dynamic analysis (IDA). With the use of these two methods, performance and various limit states of the dam have been determined, and three damage indexes have been proposed on the basis of the comparison of seismic demands and the dam's capacity. It is concluded that the SPO and IDA can be effectively used to develop indexes for seismic performance... 

Damage assessment of concrete arch dams is carried out through nonlinear Incremental Dynamic Analysis (IDA) of a typical arch dam. In this study the Morrow Point arch dam is subjected to a set of 12 three-component earthquakes each scaled to 12 increasing intensity levels. The dam-foundation interaction effects have been investigated by varying foundation's modulus of elasticity to be equal and half of dam concrete's modulus of elasticity. Damage propagation through the dam body is investigated and various IDA curves are created. The performance and various limit-states of the dam structure are examined based on the obtained results. Simple damage indices are proposed through comparison of... 

Seismic performance and safety of a jointed arch dam, as an arch-shaped mass concrete structure, are investigated through the nonlinear incremental dynamic analysis. In this way, 12 proper ground motions are selected, each of them is scaled to 12 successively increasing intensity levels and applied to the dam. Three and seven contraction joints are inserted within the dam body, and stage construction is taken into account. Several main assumptions including dam–reservoir–foundation dynamic interaction, absorbing boundary conditions at the far-ends of the reservoir and foundation, and material and joint nonlinearities are considered. The failure modes of the dam are determined according to... 

Endurance Time (ET) method is a new dynamic procedure that has been recently developed for seismic safety evaluation of structures. This method is based on the comparison of seismic response of new-designed or existing structures under intensifying ET records with the pre-assigned damage index. Also this method can efficiently reproduce the seismic responses of the structures excited by scaled earthquakes that are required in time history analysis by the codes. In this paper, first general idea of this new method is described and then is applied to evaluate the seismic safety of a cylindrical steel storage tank under multidirectional excitations. It is shown that the ET method can predict... 

Liquid storage tanks are essential structures that are often located in residential and industrial areas; thus an assessment of their seismic performance is an important engineering issue. In this paper, the seismic response of unanchored steel liquid storage tanks is investigated using the endurance time (ET) dynamic analysis procedure and compared to responses obtained for anchored tanks under actual ground motions and intensifying ET records. In most cases, the results from ground motions are properly obtained with negligible differences using ET records. It is observed that uplifting of the tank base, which is closely related to the tank aspect ratio, has the greatest significance in the... 

Aboveground steel tanks are widely utilized in residential and industrial areas, and assurance of their seismic safety is a very important engineering consideration. In this paper, nonlinear response of these tanks using a new dynamic pushover procedure called Endurance Time (ET) method along with conventional nonlinear response history (RHA) is studied. The comparison between the results of RHA and ET method shows reasonable consistency. Based on the level of accuracy observed in this research, it is concluded that ET method can effectively be used in predicting seismic performance of anchored tanks. By considerably reducing the number of required response history analyses for estimating... 

Using multiple antennas at the transmit and receive sides of a passive radar brings both the benefits of MIMO radar and passive radar. However one of the obstacles arisen in such configuration is the receive antennas placement in proper positions so that the radar performance is improved. Here we just consider the case of positioning one receiver among multiple illuminators of opportunity. Indeed it is a start for the solution of optimizing the geometry of the multiple receivers in a passive radar  

SbCl3 supported on montmorillonite K-10 is an efficient catalyst for the ring opening of epoxides with aromatic amines under solvent-free conditions and microwave irradiation to give the corresponding b-amino alcohols in high yields with high regioselectivity  

One of the important obstacles in MIMO (Multiple Input Multiple Output) radars is the issue of designing proper transmit signals. Indeed, the capability of signal design is a significant advantage in MIMO radars, through which, the system can achieve much better performance. Many different aspects of this performance improvement have been considered yet, and the transmit signals have been designed to attain such goal, e.g., getting higher SNR or better detector's performance at the receiver. However, an important tool for evaluating the radar's performance is its ambiguity function. In this paper, we consider the problem of transmit signal design, in order to optimize the ambiguity function... 

Two gains play key roles in recently developed MIMO wireless communication systems: "spatial diversity" gain and "spatial multiplexing" gain. The diversity gain refers to the capability to decrease the error rate of the MIMO channel, while the multiplexing gain implicitly refers to the amount of increase in the capacity of the MIMO channel. It has been shown that there is a fundamental tradeoff between these two types of gains, meaning interplay between increasing reliability (via an increase in the diversity gain) and increasing data rate (via an increase in the multiplexing gain). On the other hand, recently, MIMO radars have attracted much attention for their superior ability to enhance... 

It is a well known fact that using multiple antennas at transmit and receive sides improves the detection performance. However, in such multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) configuration, proper positioning of transmitters and receivers is a big challenge that can have significant influence on the performance of the overall system. In addition, determining the power of each transmitter under a total power constraint is a problem that should be solved in order to enhance the performance and coverage of such a system. In this paper, we design the Neyman-Pearson detector under the Rayleigh scatter model and use it to introduce a criterion for the antenna placement at both transmit and receive... 

There has been much interest, recently, towards exploiting the Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) technique in radar. It is shown that using multiple antennas at transmit and receive sides can improve the performance of the system. However, in order to analyze the system's performance, its ambiguity function, i.e. the ambiguity function of a MIMO radar, is needed to be defined. In this paper, beginning from the information theoretic definitions, we derive such function, specifically for a MIMO radar with widely separated antennas  

By combining the two ideas of MIMO (Multiple Input Multiple Output) and PCL (Passive Coherent Location) in radar, one can achieve the advantages of both recently developed techniques simultaneously. While using multiple antennas at the receive side provides a spatial diversity of the object to be detected, using multiple illuminators of opportunity, most importantly, makes the radar covert to the interceptors. One obstacle in such MIMO configuration is choosing the positions of the receive antennas. In this paper, after analyzing the Neyman-Pearson detector for the DVB-T based PCL, we introduce the probability of missed detection as a criterion to place the receive antenna. Here, we only... 

One of the most important obstacles in passive radar applications is removing the direct signal from the target channel. Otherwise, week echoes from the targets in the target channel would be ignored due to the limited dynamic range of the system. One of the most effective techniques in this field is using adaptive filters. In this paper various adaptive filters are introduced and their performances are shown and compared  

It has been shown that using multiple antennas in a radar system improves the performance considerably, since multiple target echoes are received from different aspect angles of the target. In this way, the target detection is improved. However, when using multiple antennas, some problems, such as designing the transmit signals, synchronization, etc. emerge that should be solved. One of such problems is the receiver placement. Receiver placement deals with choosing a proper position for the receive antenna in order to optimize the whole system's performance. In this paper, a receiver placement procedure based on improving the radar ambiguity function is proposed for the case of a multisite... 

By employing the MIMO (multiple-input-multiple-output) technology in radar, some new problems emerged, that, in order to benefit the MIMO gains in radar, it was necessary to solve them suitably. One of such obstacles is determining the positions of receive antennas in a MIMO radar system with widely separated antennas (WS MIMO radar), since it is shown that the antennas' positions affect the whole system's performance considerably. In this study, a proper receivers' positioning procedure is proposed. To do this end, four criteria are developed based on the proposed MIMO detector and the MIMO ambiguity function. The simulations verify that the proposed positioning procedure improves the... 

Phenols and alcohols are silylated with hexamethyldisilazane (HMDS) under microwave irradiation in solvent-free condition in good to excellent yields  

Modified couple stress theory is a size-dependent theorem capturing the micro/nanoscale effects influencing the mechanical behaviors of the micro- and nanostructures. In this paper, it is applied to investigate the nonlinear vibration of carbon nanotubes under step DC voltage. The vibration, natural frequencies and dynamic pull-in characteristics of the carbon nanotubes are studied in detail. Moreover, the effects of various boundary conditions and geometries are scrutinized on the dynamic characteristics. The results reveal that application of this theory leads to the higher values of the natural frequencies and dynamic pull-in voltages  

We study a classical problem in communication and wireless networks called Finding White Space Regions. In this problem, we are given a set of antennas (points) some of which are noisy (black) and the rest are working fine (white). The goal is to find a set of convex hulls with maximum total area that cover all white points and exclude all black points. In other words, these convex hulls make it safe for white antennas to communicate with each other without any interference with black antennas. We study the problem on three different settings (based on overlapping between different convex hulls) and find hardness results and good approximation algorithms