Sharif Digital Repository

This paper proposes a damage assessment framework based on the visual features of a damaged reinforced concrete shear wall, such as crack pattern distribution, crushing areal density, aspect ratio, and the presence of the boundary condition. The study contains two parts including: identifying the performance level of the damaged walls (i.e., Immediate Occupancy, Life Safety, and Collapse Prevention) and estimating the residual strength and drift ratio of the walls. The research database contains 236 images of 72 reinforced concrete shear walls tested in the laboratory under the quasi-static cyclic loadings at various drift ratios between 0 and 4%. To identify the performance level of a... 

This study investigates the effect of the variation of the properties of unreinforced brick masonry walls, such as aspect ratio, prism strength, and axial load ratio, on determining the post-earthquake damage states of the walls using fragility curves. A database comprising 245 damaged unreinforced masonry walls is collected that have been tested under the quasi-static cyclic loads up to more than three percent drift ratios. The collected walls are categorized into four damage states according to the resisting lateral force during the cyclic loading obtained from the backbone of the hysteresis curves. Then, multivariable fragility surfaces based on the drift ratio and design properties of... 

This paper presents a novel computer vision-based methodology for assessment of the seismic damage in reinforced concrete moment frames using visual characteristics of surface damage following an earthquake. An extensive collected database comprising 974 images associated with 256 cyclic-loaded damaged beam-column joints, providing a set of cracking and crushing progression with increasing the evolution of damage level, is collected and used for the development and validation of the methodology. Employing image processing techniques, the characteristics of the surface damage, including the cracking length and crushing areas, are measured and used in a scenario-based assessment for the... 

This paper proposes a new data-driven method to generate three-dimensional fragility surfaces for post-earthquake damage assessment of reinforced concrete (RC) shear walls (SWs) using image-based damage features. A research database comprised of 212 images corresponding to 66 damaged reinforced concrete shear walls tested under quasi-static cyclic loads is utilized. The walls are categorized into three damage states defined based on different load points along the backbone curve. Convolutional kernel-based filters are then employed to measure the crack patterns and crushed areas from images of the damaged walls. A set of 360,000 sub-cracks from the 212 images is analyzed using Gaussian... 

After a significant earthquake, the updated status of the structural elements is usually determined based on a qualitative visual inspection. Although visual inspection provides a prompt assessment of the damaged elements, the output of this subjective method is influenced by the experience and decision of a trained inspector, which may vary from case to case. In this study, an innovative machine learning-based procedure is developed to automate damage state identification of non-ductile reinforced concrete moment frames (RCMFs) utilizing visual indices of crack patterns of the concrete surface. An extensive database including 264 surface crack patterns is constructed corresponding to 61... 

This study proposes predictive equations for estimating the peak-experienced drift ratio of unreinforced masonry walls based on the visual characteristic of the damages. In this regard, a comprehensive database comprised of 190 images associated with 30 unreinforced masonry walls at different drift ratios between 0.0 and 1.1 percent is collected, and the visual features of the progressive damages are extracted. Various image processing filters are implemented to the images to quantify the cracking length and crushing areas. The filters are capable of distinguishing different crack patterns, such as joint cracking and block cracking. In the following, four scenarios are introduced based on... 

This paper introduces a novel methodology for identifying the post-earthquake damage states of unreinforced masonry walls using visual damage features. Current guidelines provide a qualitative description of surface cracking and crushing to determine the damage states. However, evaluating the damage states according to the qualitative damage description is highly affected by the experience and judgment of the inspector. Therefore, the present study quantifies the qualitative description of guidelines to measure the probability of reaching different damage states using 3D fragility surfaces. To this end, 333 images of 168 damaged unreinforced masonry walls at different drift ratios between... 

This paper introduces a probabilistic framework to quantify the spatial distribution of cracking and crushing in rectangular reinforced concrete shear walls at different drift ratios. In this research, a comprehensive probabilistic spatial analysis is conducted on an extensive collected database of reinforced concrete shear walls tested under the quasi-static cyclic loading. The database includes 235 images of 72 damaged walls with various geometry and material properties at different drift ratios between 0.0 and 4.0%. Various image processing filters are implemented to the images to highlight the wall areas that are more prone to cracking and crushing. Then, advanced statistical analysis is... 

Although manual crack inspection has been widely used for structural health monitoring over the last decades, the development of computer vision methods allows continuous monitoring and compensates the human judgment inaccuracy. In this study, an image-based method entitled Arc Length method is introduced for extracting crack pattern characteristics, including crack width and crack length. The method contains two major steps; in the first step, the crack zones are estimated in the whole image. Afterwards, the algorithm finds the start point, follows the crack pattern, and measures the crack features, such as crack width, crack length, and crack pattern angle. The efficiency of the method is... 

In this paper, we evaluate the capacity of Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) systems using directional antennas in non-isotropic scattering environments. Our analytical analysis approach results in closed-form approximate formulas in low Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR) regime (in contrast to previous research works which have investigated the same problem by employing experimental or simulation frameworks). We propose an upper bound for the introduced approximate error. Our results show that MIMO systems equipped with directional antennas may have much higher capacity in nonisotropic scattering environments compared to MIMO systems equipped with omni-directional antennas. We also evaluate... 

This paper addresses dynamic cell formation problem (DCFP) which has been explored vastly for several years. Although a considerable body of literature in this filed, two remarkable aspects have been significantly ignored so far, as uncertainty and human-related issues. In order to compensate such a shortage, this paper develops a bi-objective stochastic model. The first objective function of the developed model seeks to minimize total cost of machine procurement, machine relocation, inter-cell moves, overtime utilization, worker hiring/laying-off, and worker moves between cells; while the second objective function maximizes labor utilization of the cellular manufacturing system. In the... 

In this paper, trace locality of reference (LoR) is identified as a mechanism to predict the behavior of a variety of systems. If two objects were accessed nearby in the past and the first one is accessed again, trace LoR predicts that the second one will be accessed in near future. To capture trace LoR, trace graph is introduced. Although trace LoR can be observed in a variety of systems, but the focus of this paper is to characterize it for data accesses in memory management systems. In this field, it is compared with recency-based prediction (LRU stack) and it is shown that not only the model is much simpler, but also it outperforms recency-based prediction in all cases. The paper... 

It is now known that at least 10% of samples with pancreatic cancers (PC) contain a causative mutation in the known susceptibility genes, suggesting the importance of identifying cancer-associated genes that carry the causative mutations in high-risk individuals for early detection of PC. In this study, we develop a statistical pipeline using a new concept, called gene-motif, that utilizes both mutated genes and mutational processes to identify 4211 3-nucleotide PC-associated gene-motifs within 203 significantly mutated genes in PC. Using these gene-motifs as distinguishable features for pancreatic cancer subtyping results in identifying five PC subtypes with distinguishable phenotypes and... 

This paper has been prepared, based on reports regarding extraordinary induced ac voltage on buried gas pipelines in residential and industrial areas of the capital city of Tehran, especially in densely populated central areas. Also, some reports are considered on the existence of ac induced voltage in buried gas pipelines under the overhead transmission lines, for example, one case located 80 Km to the west of Tehran, in an agricultural region of the town of Abyek. In this paper, the results of an extensive theoretical, experimental and practical investigation and implementation of methods carried out during the last two years are introduced. Furthermore, this paper includes evaluation of... 

The axial turbine is one of the most challenging components of gas turbines for industrial and aerospace applications. With the ever-increasing requirement for high-aerodynamic performance blades, three-dimensional aerodynamic shape optimization is of great importance. In this research, the rear part of a gas turbine consisting of a one-stage axial turbine is optimized numerically. A useful optimization algorithm is presented to improve the efficiency and/or pressure ratio of the axial turbine with two different objective functions. The three-dimensional blade-shape optimization is employed to study the effects of the turbine stator and rotor lean and sweep angles on the turbine performance.... 

A high quality joint of zinc based pressure die cast alloys can be hardly achieved by conventional fusion welding. In this study, a novel technique to achieve the globular weld structure using stirring the localized semisolid zone during butt joining of Zamak-3 pressure die cast alloy is proposed and effect of welding parameters on mechanical and microstructural properties are investigated. A gas heating system was designed to heat up the nitrogen gas to desired temperature accurately to create a localized semisolid pool. At this stage a fine stirrer was introduced into the weld seam in order to mix the two sides into a single uniform joint. By presented process, globular microstructure of...