Sharif Digital Repository

Light propagation through turbid media, such as biological tissues, experience scattering due to inhomogeneous distribution of refractive indices of their microscopic structure. Scattering and diffusion of light not only limit many optical imaging techniques, but are also big challenges for telecommunication, spectroscopy, and other optical techniques. Recently many new imaging methods are developed that work in strongly scattering media such as optical coherence tomography, diffusion tomography, and laser speckle velocimetry. In this thesis, we have studied how wavefront shaping techniques can tackle the problem of scattering. By spatially shaping the wavefront of the incident beam, using... 

The enzymatic transesterification of castor oil with methanol in a solvent free media is carried out using lipase catalyst. The influence of several operation conditions on the production of biodiesel was analyzed i.e. the amount of enzyme, molar ratio of methanol to castor oil, reaction temperature and reaction time. It is observed that with increase in molar ratio, reaction time and enzyme amount, the amount of product (biodiesel) increased. When reaction temperature increased, the amount of biodiesel increased firstly and then decreased. The optimum conditions for the reaction were as follows: enzyme amount 300 mg, molar ratio of methanol to oil 9:1 and temperature 55°C. The maximum... 

The aim of this study is to evaluate the seismic performance of structures using a semi-active tuned mass damper minimizing the amount of structural damage caused by earthquakes. One of semi-active control mechanisms, which has been studied in recent years, is the damper with fluid controlled by a magnetic field (Magnetorehological Damper, MR). These type of dampers react to the magnetic fields that cause significant changes in the behavior of fluid flow. These dampers are acknowledged because of their simplicity, broad operating range as well as not requiring high-power energy sources. In this thesis, a MR damper is used instead of the existing viscous element of tuned mass damper. To... 

With the advent of virtual memory machines and parallel processing, there has been a considerable shift toward computer-aided design and nonlinear analysis of structures. But increasing the size of computer memory or increasing the number of processing units are not the only ways to achieve a satisfactory solution to a large, complex problem. Another useful method is to reduce the size of the problem so that the reduced model is small enough to be solved at an appropriate processing level, and yet the important engineering behavior of the model is preserved in the reduced problem.Reduced models as an alternative, have gained considerable attention throughout the years in order to meet the... 

The dynamic response of the structural systems are influenced by various parameters such as the effect of higher and torsional modes, the change in frequency or inertial loads caused by the structural softening, frequency content of earthquake records, etc.. Therefore, any method that is only based on static procedure without considering the dynamic characteristics of the structural system may lead to erroneous output. The enhanced pushover procedures have been developed to minimize the inaccuracies of the nonlinear static analyses in predicting the real nonlinear response of structures while maintaining their simplicity. In this research the innovative methods are proposed individually for... 

High-quality online services demand reliable and fast packet delivery at the network layer. However, clear evidence documents the existence of compromised routers in the ISP and enterprise networks, threatening network availability and reliability. A compromised router can stealthily drop, modify, inject, or delay packets in the forwarding path to launch Denial-of-Service, surveillance, man-in-the-middle attacks, etc. So researches tried to create intrusion detection methods to identify adversarial routers and switches. To this end, data-plane fault localization (FL) aims to identify faulty links and is an effective means of achieving high network availability. FL protocols use... 

The objective of this study is to evaluate the seismic vulnerability of the existing buildings subjected to the near field earthquakes. The main applications of this research are loss estimation and performance evaluation of the existing buildings. That could provide a better solution and particularly more useful information to the owners, investors, and insurers about the expected performance of buildings under earthquake excitations. A number of 2, 5 and 8 story reinforced concrete buildings, designed according to the old Iranian seismic provisions of ISIRI-519 and ACI 318-83 codes for the ordinary moment resisting frames, are considered. By the use of a number of near field earthquake... 

Existing structural irregularities (in plan and elevation) has always been among the important causes of structural failures under strong earthquakes. The torsional related damages have especially been very important in multi-story buildings as the torsional behavior of structures changes their uniform translational vibration and causes concentration of demands in the elements at the perimeter of the buildings. On the other hand, the Tuned Mass Dampers (TMD) have in general been accepted as an effective passive structural control device to suppress the structural vibration. In this study, Three 3-D, irregular (in plan) steel structural models with 4, 8 and 15 number of floors are considered... 

Confining nematic liquid crystal between two curved boundary conditions while the nematic molecules have a degenerate planar anchoring leads to complex and beautiful textures of molecular disparagement(defect) in the bulk and on the surfaces. Such the liquid crystal shells are made with double-emulsion techniques in microfluidic devices have provided applications for micro-scale colloidal linkers.In this work, we have numerically minimized the elastic energy in one-constant approximation in present of Fournier’s degenerate surface potential with finite element method. The nematic shell is confined between two spherical surfaces that we have studied the final energies and their related... 

A liquid crystal is a state of matter composed of highly anisotropic building blocks. When liquid crystals are exposed to surfaces with given shapes and anchoring conditions, the orientation of their molecules gets spatially disordered and topological defects may form in the system. The interplay between liquid crystals and the geometry and topology of the colloidal particles has motivated extensive recent studies.In this thesis, we present the numerical modeling results for two faceted colloidal particles in a thermotropic nematic liquid crystal. To obtain the equilibrium nematic field with a finiteelement method, we numerically minimize the free energy of the system that based on the... 

Providing high bandwidth network infrastructures for ever increasing need of data transport is of great importance. The underling infrastructure for many communication services such as GSM/3G/4G mobile networks and Internet services is Synchronous Digital Hierarchy (SDH) optical transport systems. SDH are standardized protocols that multiplex multiple lower rate digital bit streams, such as E1 and Ethernet, and transfer them synchronously over optical fiber using lasers or LEDs. In addition to high data transfer rates, flexible network management and protection mechanisms have great importance, hence are part of SDH standards. In order to obtain flexible network architecture and protected... 

Development of Smart Grid and deployment of smart meters in large scale has raised a lot of concerns regarding customers’ privacy. Consequently, several schemes have been proposed to overcome the above mentioned issue. These schemes mainly rely on data aggregation as a method of protecting users’ privacy from the grid operators. However, the main problem with most of these schemes is the fact that they require a large amount of processing power at the meter side. This, together with the fact that smart meters don’t usually have a powerful processor, can cause the unavailability of smart meter data at the required time for operators of the grid, and at the same time disables smart meters from... 

Secure routing is a major key to service maintenance in wireless ad hoc networks. Ad hoc nature exposes the network to several types of node misbehavior or attacks. Wormhole attack is one of the most severe active attacks to mobile ad hoc networks. Noting the resource limitations in such networks, nodes may have a tendency to behave selfishly. Selfish behavior can have drastic impacts on network performance. We have proposed a Misbehavior-Tolerant Multipath Routing protocol (MTMR) which detects and punishes all types of misbehavior such as selfish behavior, wormhole, sinkhole and grey-hole attacks. The protocol utilizes a proactive approach to enforce cooperation. In addition, it uses a... 

The importance of the liquid storage tanks in this era is as much as their contained liquid that we use in our daily lives. Many studies have been carried out on these influential structures considering various aspects. The major damages inflicted to the liquid storage tanks in Loma Prieta, Lozan, Hokaido, Arzinkan, Northridge, Kobe, Izmit & Haiti Earthquakes, has led the researchers to perform various experimental and analytical studies on this regard in the last few decades. The most important part of a safe design of a storage tank is the accurate estimation of the seismically induced lateral forces that should be transferred to its base through the tank shell and its support. Moreover,... 

Dynamic spectrum access with the aid of cognitive radio (CR) technology is a viable solution to spectrum scarcity. There are many military and emergency applications that require the use of cognitive radio ad-hoc networks (CRAHNs). In these net- works, nodes must first find each other in a wide spectrum and then exchange their desired data. The process of finding each other in a multichannel environment is a challenging task and is usually known as rendezvous. Since rendezvous is the first step in communication, disrupting will disable the nodes from establishing proper communication sessions. That results in a drastic degrade in the performance of the network. Therefore, it is important to... 

Spray-wall impingement is one of the phenomenon that associated in different subject such as spray cooling, combustion chamber and gas turbine. With the impingement of spray to the wall, liquid film begins to form. Wall film characteristics is still an important subject to study. Due to the various stages of liquid film formation from injection of spray till spray-wall impingement, the investigation of this phenomenon is far more complicated. This paper is meant to provide detailed data on spray-wall impingement and wall film formation physics with the help of computational analysis of OpenFOAM . A Lagrangian-Eulerian method based on discrete phase model (DPM) was employed to model... 

Cracks are the earliest signs of damage in structures which are needed to get detected through structural inspection before causing failure. Regular inspection and post-disaster inspection of structures are usually conducted manually by engineers. These kinds of visual inspections could be expensive, subjective, not reliable, and most importantly inefficient. Computer vision developments help automate this process by analyzing digital images captured from the surface of structures. Despite the fact that masonry structures have more complex surfaces than other kinds of structures, limited studies have focused on presenting machine-vision-based techniques for crack detection in those...