Sharif Digital Repository

This research examines the issues of design and fabrication of Phase Shifter circuits on Silicon substrates. The Phase Shifter circuits are designed to have wide operation band width. They also should have very low sensitivity to process and temperature variation. A six bit phase shifter is designed at this research. We use a new topology for implementing the small phase shift steps and some circuits have been designed which their phase shifts can be adjusted after fabrication. All circuits are implemented with the 0.18µm CMOS technology. The research also explains all the necessary steps for measurement of fabricated circuits. The result of measurements shows good agreement with the... 

Observed performance of nonstructural components and building contents during recent earthquakes demonstrated their significance to control economic seismic losses and downtime. Since a large portion of nonstructural equipments installed in buildings are acceleration sensitive devices, reasonable estimation of the acceleration they undergo during an earthquake has an important role in rational design of secondary systems and subsequently in reducing the earthquake damages. Although a comprehensive amount of research studies have been conducted to date to approximate the floor acceleration demands of a multistory building subjected to the earthquake ground motion, in most work, the soil... 

Earthquakes are one of the greatest natural hazards. Hazard mitigation requires studies in many areas including geotechnical aspects of earthquake engineering. Characteristics of seismic waves change significantly as they pass through soft soil layers near the earth's surface. This phenomenon, commonly known as site effects or site response, is a major factor influencing the extent of damage on structures. Processing of seismic data recorded during earthquakes is one of the most reliable methods to study site effects. The ground motions generated during earthquakes are nonstationary with respect to both amplitude and frequency. The state-of-the-art time-frequency distributions when applied... 

In order to simplify the dynamic analysis of soil-structure systems, the structural element of the foundation is usually assumed to be rigid. While the rigid foundation assumption is acceptable for block-type machine foundations, it may influence the dynamic response of other structures such as structures with a central rigid core. Previous research has shown that the flexibility of the foundation structural elements affect dynamic stiffness of underlying soil so it can change the structural response. The aim of this thesis is to study the influence of foundation flexibility on the global response of soil-structure systems including structures with a rigid core. Since the response of the... 

It is several decades that the effect of soil-structure interaction (SSI) has been known to engineers. Many methods have been developed to estimate this effect, but modal analysis of soil-structure systems is one of the most popular techniques due to its simplicity and better insight. Due to this reasons, modal analysis found its place in codes and provisions such as NEHRP. Presence of soil beneath the structure not only would alter the natural periods and damping ratio of structure but also would impose some new vibration modes to the system due to soil’s degrees of freedom. Consequently, response of structure is a combination of the effects of all these modes. But, in practice,... 

The effect of soil structure interaction, on displacement modification factor in constant reduction factors (CR) is evaluated, studied for SDOF structures placed on flexible base modeled by 3DOF system as the base foundation (a sway, a rocking and an internal degree of freedom to see the frequency dependency of dynamic stiffness of soil). 60 records of FEMA-440 for 3 types of soils (B, C and D) are analyzed for 28 different soil-structure conditions, 6 different level of reduction factors, and varied secondary hardening for 2 different hysteresis behavior to see the effect of stiffness hardening. Results are plotted in spectrums to see the role of Tn.
Final results show that effect of... 

Dynamic characteristics of structures—viz., natural frequencies, damping ratios, and mode shapes—are central to earthquake resistant design (model validation) and health monitoring. For civil structures like buildings and bridges, these characteristics can be highly influenced by surrounding soil in addition to the super-structure’s properties and cannot be correctly estimated using numerical modeling. For example, soil’s flexibility decreases the natural frequencies of the system; and in most cases, soil provides additional damping due to material hysteresis and radiation. On account of this fact, system identification techniques must be applied to extract such information from field data,... 

Usually the structures are designed based on the fixed-base assumption; however thisassumption is not always correct and the bed flexibility should be considered. This effectwhich is called soil-structure interaction, change the response of structure on both elasticand inelastic behavior. In the regulations for the design of structures on flexible base,generally soil-structure system is replaced with an equivalent fixed base structure; in theway that the design force of soil-structure system with reasonable accuracy can beestimated by equivalent fixed-base structure. In some regulations, dynamic characteristicsof equivalent structure have been determined on elastic state and the results have... 

Most construction projects contain activities repeated in project units or locations with definite consequence. These kinds of projects are called repetitive projects. One of the fundamental objectives of planning and scheduling of repetitive projects is using resources optimally and without interruption, a concept known as continuous workflow. Traditional planning and scheduling methods like Critical Path Method (CPM) are criticized for their disability to produce a reliable workflow. Ignoring the concept of workflow in project schedule causes time and cost overrun that arise from additional waiting times and also increase the risk of accessibility to resources on time. Therefore in this... 

Regarding to the value and the modeling, damping has remarkable effect on the response of the systems. More over the structural damping the soil damping also exist in the soil-structure systems. Damping resources in soil include material damping and radiation damping. The high amount of radiation damping in some cases have been led to paying less attention to material damping in some studeis. Although in many cases this is not true and in systems with little radiation damping the material damping could be really important. Generally the role of soil damping depends on the properties of the structure. On the other hand in structures with multi-degree of freedom, soil existence affects the... 

The main objective of this study is to identify the contribution of different damping mechanisms in equivalent damping of inelastic soil- structure systems which can be used to reach a better estimation of inelastic soil- structure systems response using some simplified methods. This mechanisms include the material damping of soil and structure, radiation damping of soil and also the structure’s nonlinear behavior. Despite the studies have been done, even in the fixed base systems, there is not an exact prediction for the contribution rate of inherent damping and energy absorption related to nonlinear behavior in equivalent damping of system. Considering the flexibility of soil under the... 

In this research, the effect of nonlinear behavior of soil on the nonlinear responses of super-structure has been investigated. During the design process of practical buildings, engineers usually disregard the effect of soil-structure interaction. In some cases in which the effect of soil-structure interaction is considered, nonlinear behavior of soil usually is modeled through an equivalent linear method which is proposed by the most existing design codes. Past studies show that considering the effect of soil-structure interaction, could change the responses of super-structure in comparison with those whose base are fixed. In many of these studies, nonlinear behavior of beneath soil is... 

Recent studies on inelastic behavior of soil-structure systems indicate that seismic design codes provisions, which use the same response modification factor for fixed base structures and soil-structure systems, are not appropriate and could lead to an increase in ductility demand of structures (as a part of soil-structure system). As a result, to reduce design base shear and design forces with regards to collaboration of soil-structure interaction could be in non-conservative manner. In all of these studies, the ductility component of the response modification factor (i.e. Rµ ) has been the major concern and the overstrength component has been ignored. However, the existence of... 

In a solar central system plant about 40% of energy losses occurs in the heliostat field. Furtheremore, half of the investment costs for construction of the plant is related to the heliostat field. Therefore, an optimal design of the heliostat field is necessary for reduction of levelized cost of energy in solar tower power plants. In this study, in order to optimally design the heliostat field, first energy performance of the helistat field in one year is simulated. Solar power and sun’s position at each moment of the day is determined by mathematical relations. Then, loss factors in the field are modelled and heliostat field layout is designed by an algorithm. Finally, by using PSO...