Sharif Digital Repository

Due¬ to the volatile nature of material prices, projecting highway construction costs are proven to be very difficult, leading to many challenges in cost estimation process. Bid preparations as well as project planning and control processes are also negatively affected by the concerns about the inaccuracy of cost projections. There is a growing body of evidence that suggests the use of inaccurate cost estimate can result in bid loss or profit loss for contractors and hidden price contingencies, delayed or cancelled projects, inconsistency in budgets and unsteady flow of projects for owner organizations. Analysis of historical data indicates that a relationship between construction materials... 

The most common method of oil recovery is by displacement. By injecting water into wells, to push the oil to production wells, ultimately, the injected fluid breaks through at the production wells. Estimation of breakthrough time is important for the reservoir engineering calculation and the prediction of enhance recovery scenarios. Oil reservoirs are extremely complex, containing geological heterogeneities on all length scales which have a significant impact on hydrocarbon recovery. The conventional approach to investigate the reservoir performance is to build a detailed geological model, upscale it, and finally run flow simulation which is computationally very expensive. In... 

Nowadays, robots are become more common in many important applications, such as academic and industrial issues. One of the most important robots are Multi-Arm manipulators which are used in many application such as moving objects, coloring, automatic welding and etc. Working with this kind of robots needs some vital attentions like planning their moving path. It is Because of the large number of obstacles that they face with in the path. Therefore, not only robots are not allowed to collision with themselves, but also they must not touch the obstacles. In the other words, they need Path planning. Generally, the equations of these robots are nonlinear. Therefore, computers and numerical... 

Multi-directional forging is used as a severe plastic deformation process for producing ultrafine grained materials in which a sample undergoes consecutive compressive strains and as a result, coarse grains break to smaller grains. The strength of multi-directionally forged material increases because of grain refinement, although the high strain energy reserved in a sample after large plastic deformation lessens its ductility. Metals experience non-isothermal heating cycle during annealing till they reach the target temperature. Non-isothermal heating cycle can affect microstructure and mechanical properties of severely deformed material due to its high strain energy. Thus, investigation of... 

In fractured reservoirs under the gravity mechanism, the oil transfer between the matrix blocks is affected by mechanisms such as capillary continuity or re-imbibition. Capillary continuity between adjacent matrix blocks can be created by formation of liquid bridges, or physical contact of surfaces due to the roughness of the fracture wall surface.Since the presence of liquid bridges can be effective in creating capillary continuity and therefore the amount of oil production, the study of the presence of liquid bridges between matrix blocks and how they change in terms of volume and shape in the process of oil and gas movement is of particular importance. Although there are studies on the... 

Several SPD methods have been invented for processing rods and sheets, and their physical and mechanical properties have been investigated so far. The materials processed by these methods have not been industrialized thoroughly. Moreover, in previous investigations, few works have been carried out on tubular types of materials. Thus, in this study, aluminum tube goes through a tubular channel in order to achieve different values of strains. This method is named Tube Channel Pressing. The mechanical and microstructural investigations on aluminum tubes which have been processed up to 5 passes shows that ultimate strength increases 1.7 times and sub-grains size reaches to 360 nm. Applying final... 

Polymeric microspheres which can load biomolecules, proteins and growth factors play an important role in tissue engineering and drug delivery systems. The size of the microspheres and encapsulation efficiency exert a considerable impact on the usability of them. In this study double emulsion method is used for fabrication of microspheres. Effect of different parameters namely the speed of homogenization, time of homogenization, the amount of polymer in oil phase, the surfactant concentration in different phases on the size and surface morphology of the microspheres are investigated. Moreover, a release test for BSA loaded microspheres is conducted. Results indicate that by increasing the... 

Wound healing by engineered scaffolds is a new step in bio-technology and medical studies in recent years. The goal of the current study is to propose a novel structure for a tissue-engineered scaffold to be used in wound healing. Influenced from the multi-layered structure of natural human skin, the fabricated scaffold consists of two layers to maximize similarity with natural skin. This product is comprised of an electrospun layer made of polycaprolactone and polyvinyl alcohol and a hydrogel layer made of chitosan and gelatin. In order to form a porous medium in the hydrogel layer, freeze-gelation was used instead of freeze drying. The evaluation of fabricated scaffolds was performed by... 

Corneal keratoconus is one of the common eye diseases that usually occurs in the teenage years or the beginning of the third decade of life. In this disease, the cornea thins and loses its original shape and becomes conical. To treat this disease, ophthalmologists use different methods such as using glasses, contact lenses (hard and soft), corneal transplantation, and also corneal cross-linking, each of these methods has limitations, on the other hand, considering that The disease progresses and its severity increases, Ophthalmologists use corneal rings to treat this disease in more advanced stages, implanting a suitable ring in the patient's cornea both increases the strength of the... 

The deformation of thin sheets in grooved dies is accompanied by certain limitations, primarily due to the fine serrations of the die. These serrations create stress concentration, inducing shear deformation in the thin sheet. In this study, to apply severe plastic deformation to a 1-mm-thick copper sheet, two additional 1-mm-thick sheets were used as outer layers on either side of the copper sheet. The copper sheet served as the middle layer, while the outer layers consisted of aluminum sheets in one series of experiments and low carbon steel sheets in another. This approach enabled the investigation of the influence of the outer layer hardness on the mechanical properties and... 

A particular kind of concentric bracing system composed of three members arranged in y-shaped geometry is examined in this thesis. The non-straight diagonal strut of this off-centre bracing causes eccentricity to the system and is connected to the frame corner through a third member. Providing adequate openings in braced bays accompanied by improved energy dissipation are resulted in positive attitude toward using y-bracing frame as a lateral load resisting system. However, lacking of specific design codes could be problematic for engineers. To overcome this incompetency, seismic performance factors including the response modification coefficient, the system overstrength factor, and... 

In recent years, various research has been done on the severe deformation of low carbon steel sheets. One of the methods used is the pressing in the grooved die, only two passes of the pressing process in the grooved mold have been successful when applied to these sheets, but on the other hand, these two passes also lessen the sheet's ductility while increasing its strength. Due to the fact that the sheet surface produced by the pressing in the grooved die is not entirely smooth, the attempt in this project was to improve the ductility to some extent using warm rolling in addition to the smoothness of the surface using higher temperature while improving the strength or maintain it. To... 

Friction stir welding (FSW) is an appropriate method for joining Aluminum structures. In this method lots of defects involved in other methods are not formed and good properties are achieved for Aluminum joints. The metal sheets joined by this method are used to manufacture metal structures bodies. One of the important issues in the structure bodies used in transportation is the amount of energy absorbed in collision with other objects. One of the methods to investigate the energy absorption is wedge tearing test and one other is tensile test. In the preset study two sheets of Al 1050 were joined using FSW method in different tool rotational and welding speeds. Firstly, the microstructure of... 

One of the limitations of friction stir welding process is joining of sheets with low thickness. Interference ways for these limitations are joint in higher thicknesses and thickness reduction in included joint samples. In this study, in the first process, with the optimization of the variables affecting the process, joint was performed using visual inspection, mechanical properties and micro structural studies. In the next process, using the rolling operation for the reduction percent of different thicknesses, the most appropriate route was chosen. 1050 aluminum sheets (1050 and 6082-T6) with a thickness of 3 mm were welded using friction stir welding in tool rotary speeds of 1200 and 800... 

An increase in strength of friction stir welded (FSW) AA3003-H18 sheets is important, due to the reduction of mechanical properties in weld area such as heat affected zone and stir zone during welding. In this research, at first FSW was used to join 3003-H18 non-heat-treatable aluminum plates without adding copper powder. The specimens were joined at various rotational speeds (800, 1000 and 1200 rpm) and traverse speeds (40, 70 and 100 mm/min). In these cases, the effects of welding parameters on microstructure and mechanical properties were investigated. The average grain size of stir zone was in the range of 21.7-7.8 μm and the microhardness of them was 28-37 Hv. Then FSW was used to join... 

In the present study, Friction Stir Process (FSP) was used to refine the microstructure of pure commercial copper in order to improve the mechanical properties. Since FSP can be considered as a hot deformation process, theoretical Models were utilized to simulate both thermal history and strain rate distribution. Zener-Hollomon parameter (Z) was then utilized to predict the microstructure of Stir Zone (SZ) which undergoes the Dynamic Recrystallization (DRX). Temperature distribution was formulated and solved by a commercial software COMSOL Multiphysics. Strain rate was analyzed using theoretical models and the codes were written by MATLAB. The predicted grain size was not in a good agreement... 

Carbon nanotubes are cylinders in Nano scale formed of carbon atoms with covalent bonds that contain a significant electrical and mechanical features. Carbon nanotubes are divided into two main types: multi-walled carbon nanotubes (MWCNTs) and single walled carbon nanotubes (SWCNTs). A SWCNT is a rolled graphene sheet (graphene is in fact a single sheet of graphite). SWCNTs has lately been considered as one of most interesting research cases. The reason why researchers have been fond of investigating about graphene has been its unconventional quantum hall effects, high room-temperature electrical conductivity and its mechanical stability despite of being composed of single layer atom... 

In this study, two multiscale hierarchical atomisyic/molecular dynamics (MD)–finite element (FE) coupling methods are proposed to illustrate the influence of temperature on mechanical properties of SLGS in large deformation. The Tersoff interatomic potential is implemented, in addition, the Nose-Hoover thermostat and local harmonic approximation are employed to adjust the fluctuation of temperature in CB and MD, respectively. The atomic nonlinear elastic parameters are obtained via computing second-order derivative of Representative atom’s energy and RVE’s strain energy density with respect to deformation criterions (deformation gradient and Green strain tensor). To bridge between atomistic... 

In this study, a novel multiscale hierarchical molecular dynamics (MD) – finite element (FE) coupling method is proposed to illustrate the influence of temperature on mechanical properties of heterogeneous nano-crystalline structures. The embedded-atom method (EAM) many-body interatomic potential is implemented to consider pairwise interactions between atoms in the metallic alloys with face-centered-cubic (FCC) lattice structure at different temperatures. In addition, the Nose-Hoover thermostat is employed to adjust the fluctuation of temperature. In order to calculate the equivalent lattice parameter, a weight average between the lattice parameters of atomic structures is utilized. The...