Sharif Digital Repository

Rapid assessment of structural safety and performance right after the occurrence of significant earthquake shaking is crucial for building owners and decision-makers to make informed risk management decisions. Hence, it is vital to develop online and pseudo-online health monitoring methods to quantify the health of the building right after significant earthquake shaking. Many Bayesian inference–based methods have been developed in the past which allow the users to estimate the unknown states and parameters. However, one of the most challenging part of the Bayesian inference–based methods is the determination of the parameter noise covariance matrix. It is especially difficult when the number... 

Online selection of the appropriate model and identifying its parameters based on measured vibrational data are among the challenging issues in dynamic system identification. After a severe earthquake, quick monitoring and assessment of structural health status play a crucial role in effective critical risk management for the building owners and decision-makers. The Bayesian multiple modeling approach is a suitable tool for optimal model class selection, which is used in this article mainly for improving data fitting precision, decreasing dimensions of structural unknown vector through removing unnecessary parameters, detecting the occurrence and type of predominant phenomenon related to... 

Online selection of the appropriate model and identifying its parameters based on measured vibrational data are among the challenging issues in dynamic system identification. After a severe earthquake, quick monitoring and assessment of structural health status play a crucial role in effective critical risk management for the building owners and decision-makers. The Bayesian multiple modeling approach is a suitable tool for optimal model class selection, which is used in this article mainly for improving data fitting precision, decreasing dimensions of structural unknown vector through removing unnecessary parameters, detecting the occurrence and type of predominant phenomenon related to... 

Rapid assessment of structural safety and performance right after the occurrence of significant earthquake shaking is crucial for building owners and decision-makers to make informed risk management decisions. Hence, it is vital to develop online and pseudo-online health monitoring methods to quantify the health of the building right after significant earthquake shaking. Many Bayesian inference–based methods have been developed in the past which allow the users to estimate the unknown states and parameters. However, one of the most challenging part of the Bayesian inference–based methods is the determination of the parameter noise covariance matrix. It is especially difficult when the number... 

A practical design method is presented which used the fuzzy logic advantages in adaptation of sliding mode control. The combined Fuzzy Adaptive Sliding Control (FASC) is designed in such a way to enhance satisfactory sliding performance and robustness with good level of chattering alleviation. The design approach is valid for a class of nonlinear uncertain MIMO systems. This control algorithm does not require the system model. A supervisory term is appended to the controller to assure the stability of fuzzy sliding mode control through Lyapunov theory. The design approach has been applied to a 2DOF twin propeler system with large uncertainty. Simulation results verified effectiveness of... 

This paper is devoted to the characterization of an extended family of continuous-time autoregressive moving average (CARMA) processes that are solutions of stochastic differential equations driven by white Lévy innovations. These are completely specified by: 1) a set of poles and zeros that fixes their correlation structure and 2) a canonical infinitely divisible probability distribution that controls their degree of sparsity (with the Gaussian model corresponding to the least sparse scenario). The generalized CARMA processes are either stationary or nonstationary, depending on the location of the poles in the complex plane. The most basic nonstationary representatives (with a single pole... 

An efficient hybrid modal-molecular dynamics method is developed for the vibration analysis of large scale nanostructures. Using the reduced order method, presented in this paper, linear and nonlinear vibrations of a suspended graphene nanoribbon (GNR) carrying an electric current in a harmonic magnetic field are investigated. The resonance frequencies as well as the nonlinear vibration response obtained by the present technique and direct molecular dynamic simulations are in very good agreement. Also, the obtained results illustrate the hardening behavior of nonlinear vibrations which is diminished by stretching the GNR  

Teratozoospermia is one of conditions that can cause male infertility. The mechanism of teratozoospermia remains unclear. The knowledge of the metabolites in human seminal plasma (HSP) is meaningful for the pathological study of teratozoospermia. Analysis of changed metabolites in HSP can help understand the cellular mechanism, find the novel biomarkers and subsequently design a diagnosis test. In this study, the analysis of samples performed by proton nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy (1H NMR spectroscopy) to identify the various metabolites, with the aim of finding metabolic profiles and biomarkers related to male infertility. Eighteen de-regulated metabolites were identified in... 

Biodegradable polymers such as chitosan have been used extensively in biomedical fields in the form of sutures; wound dressing and as artificial skin. Colonic drug delivery for either local or systemic effects has been the subject of much research over the last decade. Chitosan exhibits poor solubility at pH values above 6 that prevent enhancing effects at sites of absorption of drugs. In the present work, N-diethyl methyl chitosan (DEMC) was prepared based on a modified two-step process via a 22 factorial design to optimize the preparative conditions. DEMC Polymer with different degrees of quaternization for pharmacological and pharmaceutical experiments was achieved. The reaction was... 

Etheno-damaged DNA adducts such as 3,N4- ethenocytosine, N 2,3-ethenoguanine, and 1,N2-ethenoguanine are associated with carcinogenesis and cell death. These inevitable damages are counteracted by glycosylase enzymes, which cleave damaged nucleobases from DNA. Escherichia coli alkyl purine DNA glycosylase is the enzyme responsible for excising damaged etheno adducts from DNA in humans. In an effort to understand the intrinsic properties of these molecules, we examined gasphase acidity values and proton affinities (PA) of multiple sites of these molecules as well as equilibrium tautomerization and base pairing properties by quantum mechanical calculations. We also used calculations to compare... 

Interactions of α-D-glucose with gold, silver, and copper metal clusters are studied theoretically at the density functional theory (CAM-B3LYP) and MP2 levels of theory, using trimer clusters as simple catalytic models for metal particles as well as investigating the effect of cluster charge by studying the interactions of cationic and anionic gold clusters with glucose. The bonding between α-D-glucose and metal clusters occurs by two major bonding factors; the anchoring of M atoms (M = Cu, Ag, and Au) to the O atoms, and the unconventional M.H-O hydrogen bond. Depending on the charge of metal clusters, each of these bonds contributes significantly to the complexation. Binding energy... 

The effects of H2O/SiO2, TMAOH/SiO2, Na/(Na+K), and SiO2/Al2O3 ratios in the parent gels on the crystallization of nanoparticles of T-type zeolites were studied. A Taguchi orthogonal experimental design with the above-mentioned parameters (each at three levels) was used to optimize the experiment parameters by the analysis of variances (ANOVA). Applying the Taguchi method significantly reduced the time and cost required for optimization. The synthesized products were characterized by X-ray diffraction and scanning electron microscopy. As a result of the Taguchi analysis, H2O/SiO2 and TMAOH/SiO2 were the most influencing parameters for the synthesis of zeolite T. © 2009 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH... 

A practical design method is presented which used the fuzzy logic advantages in adaptation of sliding mode control. The combined Fuzzy Adaptive Sliding Control (FASC) is designed in such a way to enhance satisfactory sliding performance and robustness with good level of chattering alleviation. The design approach is valid for a class of nonlinear uncertain MIMO systems. This control algorithm does not require the system model. A supervisory term is appended to the controller to assure the stability of fuzzy sliding mode control through Lyapunov theory. The design approach has been applied to a 2DOF twin propeler system with large uncertainty. Simulation results verified effectiveness of... 

A novel biopolymer-based superabsorbent hydrogel was synthesized through chemical crosslinking by graft copolymerization of partially neutralized acrylic acid onto the hydrolyzed collagen, in the presence of a crosslinking agent and a free radical initiator. The Taguchi method, a robust experimental design, was employed for the optimization of the synthesis reaction based on the swelling capacity of the hydrogels. This method was applied for the experiments and standard L16 orthogonal array with three factors and four levels were chosen. The critical parameters that have been selected for this study are crosslinker (N,N′-methylene bisacrylamide), initiator (potassium persulfate), and monomer... 

Image fusion means to integrate information from one image to another image. Medical images according to the nature of the images are divided into structural (such as CT and MRI) and functional (such as SPECT, PET). This article fused MRI and PET images and the purpose is adding structural information from MRI to functional information of PET images. The images decomposed with Nonsubsampled Contourlet Transform and then two images were fused with applying fusion rules. The coefficients of the low frequency band are combined by a maximal energy rule and coefficients of the high frequency bands are combined by a maximal variance rule. Finally, visual and quantitative criteria were used to... 

In this paper, we focus on the heavy-tailed stochastic signals generated through continuous-time autoregressive (CAR) models excited by infinite-variance α-stable processes. Our goal is to estimate the parameters of the continuous-time model, such as the autoregressive coefficients and the distribution parameters related to the excitation process for the α-stable CAR process with 0<α>2 based on the state-space representation. Likewise, we investigate the closed form expressions for the parameters of equivalent model in the discrete-time setting via regular samples of the process. We analyze the estimator based on the Monte Carlo simulations and illustrate the estimator consistency to the... 

The shape memory alloys (SMAs) and smart composites have a large use in high and low level industry, while a lot of research is being done in this field. The existence of smart composite structures is because of the advance mechanical benefits of the above materials. This work refers to dynamic and quasi static nonlinear explanation of these materials. After mathematical model consideration on the rate of strain, a model which is about martensite ratio of NiTi has been presented. This work has been done because of the high sensitivity of these materials to strain rate and use of visual and measurable engineering criteria to access other variables. As the martensite ratio is not engineering... 

In this paper, one smart composite involving nitinol, piezoelectric and MMC is modeled. This simulation covers all criteria in these advanced materials and theoretically solves the five-order equation. Furthermore, numerical sample is investigated and results have been explored. The results represent the relationship between natural frequency of the structure, temperature, the lateral deflection and martensite ratio of shape memory alloy. The results show nonlinearity response in dynamic motion in lower natural frequency and linear behavior in higher frequency. In this simulation, numerical approximation has been avoided. Copyright © 2009 by ASME