Sharif Digital Repository

It has been realized that the raft (mat) foundations are capable of bearing very large loads when they are assisted with a pile group. The contribution of both raft and piles to carry the surcharge loads is taken into account, considering the stiffness and strength of involved elements in the system, i.e. piles, raft and surrounding soil. The piles are usually required not to ensure the overall stability of the foundation but to act as settlement reducers. There is an alternative design in which, the piles are nonconnected from the raft to reduce the settlement, which are then known to be "settlement reducer non-connected piles" to increase the system stiffness. In this paper, two and three... 

This paper looks at the question of what second language learners know about syntax but could not have "learned." It is hypothesized that if we show second-language learners know a particular aspect of the second language (L2) syntax which could not have been learned via formal explanation, and that aspect did not exist in their first language (L1) syntax, we can argue that there is something internal (in their minds/brains) that is responsible for such knowledge - the language organ. The study is intended to offer evidence for biolinguistics from the field of Second Language Acquisition  

Time-variant axial and radial electromagnetic for ces under inrush current and short-circuit current are calculated (by finite element method; FEM) and compared. A simplified analytic method is presented for computation of inrush current in transformer. The simulation results obtained by this method are compared with the measured values. A compact three-phase, core-type 132/20 KV, 30 MVA, power transformer is modeled, employing two-dimensional (2D) FEM, the different forces under short-circuit and inrush current conditions are evaluated as a function of time. The simulation results for this sample transformer show that the inrush current axial force is larger than clamping force (which is... 

In this paper, a new fully decentralized control strategy for the ALESTOM gasifier benchmark is presented. The proposed decentralized fault-tolerant control scheme overcomes the conventional drawbacks of the previously developed centralized strategies for the linearized model of gasifier system. To achieve the objective, first, the best pairing has been selected based on integrity screening tools as well as physical considerations. Then, a fully decentralized Proportional Integral (PI) controller has been proposed. Finally simulation results performed in MATLAB show that the designed controller is capable of achieving desired performance for three different scenarios, i.e., full, half and no... 

Renovation and retrofit of gas turbine control systems yield significant economic savings, enhanced reliability, and improved performance. In recent years, the gas turbine industry is increasingly facing the need to well-established procedures for the acceptance tests of renovated control systems. This paper proposes a unified framework to evaluate the performance of renovated gas turbine control systems. Under a set of assumptions on the ambient and fuel conditions, a low-complexity modular model is presented and identified using optimization-oriented identification techniques. The accuracy of the proposed model is validated through experimental studies in full-load, min-load, and no-load... 

Renovation and retrofit of gas turbine control systems yield significant economic savings, enhanced reliability, and improved performance. In recent years, the gas turbine industry is increasingly facing the need to well-established procedures for the acceptance tests of renovated control systems. This paper proposes a unified framework to evaluate the performance of renovated gas turbine control systems. Under a set of assumptions on the ambient and fuel conditions, a low-complexity modular model is presented and identified using optimization-oriented identification techniques. The accuracy of the proposed model is validated through experimental studies in full-load, min-load, and no-load... 

Block motion estimation is an important field of video processing. This paper presents a new scheme to reach in faster block motion estimation based on motion prediction. The scheme exploits an adaptive filter to predict the block motion from its spatio-temporal motion compensated adjacent blocks, the predicted motion determines the initial candidate block for search methods with biased search center, in special case of partial distortion search, this strategy reduces search time by preventing from complete distortion calculation for more loser candidates, after comparison of three conventional adaptive filters, a normalized least mean square filter with convergence monitoring is recommended... 

Energy storage is one of the most important components of renewable energy systems. Among different methods, thermal energy storage (TES) in forms of sensible or latent has been the subject of many studies in the past decades. The main difficulty in optimal design of storage tanks is associated with low thermal conductivity of the storing (solid or phase change) material. In fact, the distribution of thermal energy from a source to the body of storing material poses a volume to point problem which is the subject of constructal theory. Therefore, the objective of the present paper is to investigate the transient behavior of a rectangular thermal energy storage tank equipped with fin... 

In this paper, the general solution of steady-state 1D radially symmetric mechanical and thermal stresses and electrical and mechanical displacements for a hollow thick cylinder made of fluid-saturated functionally graded poro piezoelectric materials (FGPPMs) is developed. The general form of thermal and mechanical boundary conditions is considered on the inside and outside surfaces. A direct method is used to solve the heat conduction equation and nonhomogenous system of partial differential Navier equations, using complex Fourier series and power law functions method. The material properties, except the Poisson ratio, are assumed to depend on the radial variable r and they are expressed as... 

As efficiency of PV modules decreases with temperature rise, cooling methods can increase the power output and efficiency. One of the strategies for this purpose is passive cooling by implementing fins to the backside of a module. In the present study, annual energy output of a 50 W panel is analytically calculated in two unfinned and pin-finned cases based on hourly meteorological data for Shiraz, Iran. The results show that with the installation of 2-cm, 4-cm and 6-cm aluminum pin fins with finned-to-total-backside-area ratios of 0.17, 0.27 and 0.55, the power output increases by 1.24–4.16%, compared to the unfinned case. This increase is equivalent to 1.04–3.50 kWh more electrical energy... 

Naturalness in Text-to-Speech (TTS) systems is very important in achieving high quality waveform. The naturalness of the waveform is highly correlated to phonetic coverage and prosodic features such as loudness, duration and pitch. This paper addresses the implementation of a prosodic TTS for Azeri. The TTS system to which the prosodic information is added, is a concatenative synthesizer based on diphones. For adding prosody and increasing naturalness, we have obtained a primary pitch curve for each word, based on the location of the stressed syllable. Also using sentence type effects, the final pitch contour has been modified. As far as we know, the output speech that is produced with this... 

We have studied the effect of sintering temperature on the weak link behavior of polycrystalline Bi2223 superconductors with different intergranular coupling using the XRD, electrical resistivity and AC susceptibility techniques. The XRD results show that by increasing sintering temperature up to 865°C the Bi2212 phase fraction decrease. It was found that the Bi2212 phase on the grain boundaries is likely to play the role of weak links and consequently reduces the intergranular critical current densities. © 2006 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA  

In this paper, we demonstrate the applicability of the perturbation methods to different elastic models of DNA molecule. Two different kinds of perturbation methods are presented to find a first approximation for the force-extension characteristic of DNA in the anisotropic wormlike chain model, and the persistence length of DNA in the asymmetric elastic rod model. In both cases we show that it is meaningful to use the perturbation theory, and a first-order calculation is enough to find the result with an acceptable accuracy  

A nonlocal harmonic elastic rod model is proposed to describe the elastic behavior of short DNA molecules. We show that the nonlocal interactions contribute to effective bending energy of the molecule and affect its apparent persistence length. It is also shown that the anomalous behavior which has been observed in all-atom molecular dynamic simulations [A. K. Mazur, Biophys. J. 134, 4507 (2006)] can be a consequence of both nonlocal interactions between DNA base pairs and the intrinsic curvature of DNA  

Prepositions are considered as frequent linguistic units, whose role in computational linguistics cannot be neglected. These units are often thought to have functional meaning. On the other hand, in some cases, the substitution of one particular preposition with another onewould changethe meaning ofa sentence. This paper argues that prepositions are not meaningless units, which are only used for the purpose of sentence cohesion. The central goal of the research is to show that prepositions are meaning distinguishing elements. In order to achieve this goal, five Persian prepositions are examined in a Persian text corpus. Firstly, 1000 sentences consisting of these prepositions are extracted... 

In this paper, we try to explain the origin of the anomalous elastic behavior of nanometersized DNA molecules, which has been observed in all-atom molecular dynamic simulations [A.K. Mazur, Biophys. J. 2006]. It is shown that this anomalous behavior is a consequence of nonlocal interactions between DNA base pairs and the intrinsic curvature of DNA. A nonlocal harmonic elastic rod model is proposed, which can successfully describe the elastic behavior of short DNA molecules  

In this paper a variational framework for joint segmentation and motion estimation is employed for inspecting heart in Cine MRI sequences. A functional including Mumford-Shah segmentation and optical flow based dense motion estimation is approximated using the phase-field technique. The minimizer of the functional provides an optimum motion field and edge set by considering both spatial and temporal discontinuities. Exploiting calculus of variation principles, multiple partial differential equations associated with the Euler-Lagrange equations of the functional are extracted, first. Next, the finite element method is used to discretize the resulting PDEs for numerical solution. Several... 

In this paper we consider the anharmonic corrections to the anisotropic elastic rod model for DNA. Our model accounts for the difference between the bending energies of positive and negative rolls, which comes from the asymmetric structure of the DNA molecule. We will show that the model can explain the high flexibility of DNA at small length scales, as well as kink formation at high deformation limit. © 2009 The American Physical Society  

We present a perturbation theory to find the response of an anisotropic DNA to the external tension. It is shown that the anisotropy has a nonzero but small contribution to the force-extension curve of the DNA. Thus an anisotropic DNA behaves like an isotropic one with an effective bending constant equal to the harmonic average of its soft and hard bending constants. © 2008 American Institute of Physics  

Mesh-based motion estimation is an important tool for video coding especially with low bit rate. In this paper, a new method for interpolating pixel motion from adjacent mesh nodes with the ability of omitting independent nodes is proposed. By exploiting fuzzy rules to determine the association of pixel and neighboring nodes, the proposed interpolation can detach pixels from some nodes. Consequently, it can deal with those critical patches on objects boundary which their nodes do not belong to one object. Updating the membership functions of each rule with specified strategy makes the interpolation adaptive with non-stationary conditions of image sequences and decreases sensitivity to...