Sharif Digital Repository

Underwater surface of man-made structures is quickly covered by unwanted aquatic organisms. They change the flow regime around the structure. Despite the important contributions of previous studies on the vortex induced vibration (VIV) of bluff bodies, the flow induced vibration of non-stationary cylinders covered by marine fouling appears not to have received due attentions in the literature. The current paper reports on an attempt for better understanding the marine fouling effects on the VIV of circular cylinders. A structured review of the literature related to the fluid structure interactions in marine fouled cylinders is first presented. Results of an experimental study on the VIV of... 

Finger-Knuckle-Print (FKP) is one of the newest biometrics. In this paper, a novel approach has been proposed to segment the Region of Interest (ROI) of a FKP image using the global intensity. This method upgrades the speed and accuracy of segmentation stage, as well as the pace of other steps of the procedure. This has been achieved by employing the area with maximum intensity in ROI extraction, instead of using the creases of the knuckle image. To confirm this improvement, lots of experiments have been performed and the method has been compared with the only existing schemes for ROI extraction suggested by Zhang and Kekre. At the end, the captured ROI images obtained by three methods have... 

Steel Reinforced Elastomeric Bearings (SREB) are mostly designed and used for providing different supporting conditions under service loads; while recent studies have shown remarkable characteristics which help them as a cost-effective isolation system. However, little investigation has been carried out to indicate the influence of parameters affecting the mechanical properties of the bearings under large shear deformations (i.e., the seismic performance as an isolation system). A comparative parametric study was conducted herein through finite element modeling of SREBs. The implemented model was also verified by experimental test results. The hysteretic behavior was studied in both cases of... 

Reduction of large tensile stresses and cost-efficiency has made unbonded isolators an attractive option as an isolation system. Following this idea and the results obtained by various researchers, it is shown that unbonded steel-reinforced elastomeric bearings (SREBs), which are used and designed for non-seismic actions, have inherently acceptable characteristics in tolerating large shear deformations for a cost-effective isolation system and can provide improved structural performance. However, this capacity is neglected in the design process. The current article presents an experimental program to analyze the mechanical properties of steel-reinforced natural rubber bearings without the... 

River water quality monitoring using traditional water sampling and laboratory analyses is expensive and time-consuming. The application of artificial neural network (ANN) models to simulate water quality parameters is cost-effective, quick, and reliable. This study provides two methods of mathematical and ANN modeling to simulate and forecast five important river water quality indicators (DO, TDS, SAR, BOD5, HCO3) correlated with variables such as EC, temperature, and pH which can be measured easily and almost with no cost. The mathematical method is based on polynomial fitting with least square method and the neural network model was developed using a feed-forward algorithm. The 35 years’... 

Following the idea of using unbonded isolators to eliminate the tensile stress and providing a cost-effective isolation system, recent experimental research has shown ordinary unbonded steel reinforced elastomeric bearings (SREBs) as an attractive option for seismic isolation of highway bridges. The focus of current research work is on the evaluation of the seismic vulnerability of a highway bridge isolated by unbonded SREBs through developing fragility curves of the structure. This assessment considers parameters playing a key role in the isolation system behavior, namely the friction coefficient, as well as the isolator aging effects. In this regard, a typical three-span highway bridge is... 

The reaction kinetics and chemical equilibrium of the reversible catalytic hydrolysis reaction of a methyl acetate to acetic acid and methanol using a strongly acidic ion exchange resin catalyst named Amberlyst 15 were studied. To investigate the different behavior of Amberlyst 15 in the adsorption of reactants and product species, the equilibrium behavior of binary non-reactive liquid mixtures, consisting of one reactant and one product were studied experimentally. The Langmuir model was used to describe the equilibrium condition, quantitatively. Then the employed model was compared with the more complicated thermodynamic models to describe the equilibrium between the catalytic polymer... 

A new unbreakable solid-phase microextraction fiber coating based on polyethylene terephthalate/graphene nanocomposite was developed. The nanocomposite coatings were prepared by an electrospinning technique using a polyethylene terephthalate (PET) polymer solution containing the dispersed graphene on the outer surface of a stainless-steel rod. The applicability of polyethylene terephthalate/graphene nanocomposite coatings was examined by extraction of organochlorine compounds (OCs) including heptachlor epoxide, aldrin, γ-HCH, and β-HCH from aqueous samples in headspace mode. Influential parameters on extraction efficiency such as polymer concentration, the weight ratio of components, the... 

Unreinforced masonry (URM) buildings are rather popular around the globe due to low construction costs, even though they can be prone to substantial damage caused by even moderate earthquakes. Numerous URM buildings that have experienced damages from past earthquakes require to be upgraded or at least return to their undamaged state in order to be able to withstand future earthquakes. In many cases, reconstruction is not the best choice because of financial and time restrictions. As such, repair/retrofit is the best choice, assuring the post-earthquake serviceability. Furthermore, seismic repair/retrofit can be a cost-efficient method to avoid reconstruction complexities and expenses. In... 

In the current study, electrospun-based ionic liquid (IL) doped polyamide (PA) nanofibers were prepared and used as the coating material of solid phase microextration device in the fiber geometry. Addition of IL, decyl-3-methylimidazolium mono bromate, increased the conductivity of the PA solution facilitating the electrospining process. The scanning electron microscopy images of decyl-3-methylimidazolium mono bromated/polyamide nanofibers showed the decreased diameter of the nanofibers in the range of 35–160 nm compared to the PA nanofiber. The factors affecting the structure of nanofibers (e.g. ratio of decyl-3-methylimidazolium mono bromate to PA, coating time and applied voltage) were... 

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  

In this paper, we consider an integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) system with wireless power transfer (WPT) where an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-based radar serves a group of energy-limited communication users in addition to its sensing functionality. In this architecture, the radar senses the environment in phase 1 (namely sensing phase) and mean-while, the communications users (nodes) harvest and store the energy from the radar transmit signal. The stored energy is then used for information transmission from the nodes to UAV in phase 2, i.e., uplink phase. Performance of the radar system depends on the transmit signal as well as the receive filter; the energy of the transmit... 

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...