Sharif Digital Repository

The aim of this paper is to provide a solution to decrease water consumption in the slab-cooling unit of Mobarakeh Steel Complex in Iran. The plan should give an hourly decline in water consumption during a one-year operation period to calculate the annual reduction in water consumption of the proposed process. Recommended solutions for the conversion scheme of an existing wet cooling tower to a dry or hybrid cooling system require modeling of the slab cooling process. The curves of temperature drop in slabs are extracted in this paper by modeling the transient heat transfer of the slabs in the cooling process. This will reduce the computational volume. Then, the design and optimization of... 

Direct reduction of iron process in steel industry has special production conditions. Low quality cooling water, low cold and high hot cooling water temperature, space limitation for new equipment installation, high value-added of product and severe effect of cooling water temperature on production rate are of these conditions. Considering technical and economic constraints and limitations, this situation makes this process an attractive case study for converting the existing wet cooling tower to hybrid cooling system. In this paper, based on integration of process, dry and wet cooling system and ambient conditions profiles, a new method for designing hybrid cooling system has been proposed.... 

Arbitrary Lagrangian Eulerian (ALE) method is widely used for simulation of large deformation problems, such as metal forming. However, in many such applications, modeling of the heat generation and transfer in conjunction with the stress analysis is necessary. In this work, a fully coupled dynamic ALE formulation is developed. The ALE form of energy balance equation is derived, and is coupled with the dynamic, rate dependent ALE stress analysis. The proposed formulation is used for simulation of a few thermo-mechanical problems. The effectiveness and efficiency of the ALE method is verified by comparing the results of this simulation with available experimental and numerical results  

The motor symptoms of Parkinson's disease (PD) have been shown to significantly improve by Levodopa. However, despite the widespread adoption of Levodopa as a standard pharmaceutical drug for the treatment of PD, cognitive impairments linked to PD do not show visible improvement with Levodopa treatment. Furthermore, the neuronal and network mechanisms behind the PD-induced cognitive impairments are not clearly understood. In this work, we aim to explain these cognitive impairments, as well as the ones exacerbated by Levodopa, through examining the differential dynamic patterns of the phase-amplitude coupling (PAC) during cognitive functions. EEG data recorded in an auditory oddball task... 

In the first part of this paper series, a complete formulation for fully coupled ALE analysis of large deformation solid mechanic problems was developed. The formulation incorporated inertial, rate and thermal effects, and the treatment of rate and temperature dependent constitutive equations were presented. In this part, the ALE equations are discretized to form finite element equations. An algorithm for the treatment of mesh motion is described and example problems are presented to demonstrate the capability of the proposed formulation  

Arbitrary Lagrangian Eulerian (ALE) finite element method is extensively used for numerical simulation of solid mechanics problem. The versatility of the mesh in ALE approach makes it particularly effective and efficient in solving large deformation problems. In this work, a complete treatment of fully coupled ALE formulation is presented incorporating inertial, rate and thermal effects. The formulation may be used in conjunction with thermo-elasto-viscoplactic material models. A consistent and efficient tangent operator is developed in closed form to handle stress integration. The applications of this formulation are given in the second part of this paper  

In this paper, formulation and implementation of finite element analysis within an Arbitrary Lagrangian Eulerian (ALE) description is presented for large deformation analysis of elasto-viscoplastic materials. The rate effects are included using a consistent procedure. An implicit algorithm with backward Euler integration scheme is used to integrate the elasto-viscoplastic constitutive equations. Also, the closed form of the consistent tangent operator is derived using the momentum balance equation to reduce the computation time. A fully coupled ALE procedure is used which includes dynamic effects. The proposed algorithm is implemented in an ALE code and its effectiveness and efficiency is... 

Three new chromophores based on the triphenylamine (MM, DM, DN) with various novel electron withdrawing anchoring groups have been synthesized for use in dye-sensitized solar cells (DSSCs). The sensitizers were characterized by 1H and 13C NMR, Mass, UV–Vis, and electrochemical analysis. The HOMO and LUMO electron distributions of the sensitizers were calculated using density functional theory on a B3LYP level for geometry optimization. The DSSC device based on DM dye showed the best photovoltaic performance among MM and DN dyes: maximum monochromatic incident photon-to-current conversion efficiency (IPCE) of 98 %, short circuit current (JSC) of 4.58 mA/cm2, open circuit voltage (VOC) of... 

Fatigue behavior of quasi-isotropic carbon/epoxy laminates were studied, using six stacking sequences. Experimental results show that there is a significant stacking sequence effect on monotonic and cyclic performance of laminates. Though by changing the stacking sequence the difference between failure strength of the strongest and weakest lay-ups reaches only to ∼ 12 %, the difference between fatigue lives (cycles to failure) increased ∼ 1000% in some loading regions. In addition, both linear and sigmoidal functions were examined to model the fatigue life behavior  

In the current investigation, four novel donoracceptor type organic dyes including (DPA-Ba, DPA-Hy, DPA-Rh, DPA-Cy), are proposed and their photophysical and electrochemical properties as well as dye-sensitized solar cell performance are systematically investigated. Among these dyes diphenylamine is utilized as an-electron donor while barbituric acid, hydantoin, rhodanine-n-acetic acid and cyano acetic acid, are proposed as anchoring groups as dye-sensitized solar cells (DSSCs). The synthesized dyes are characterized using FT-IR, NMR, mass spectrometry, absorbance and electrochemical measurements. The photophysical, electrochemical and photovoltaic properties of the solar cells based on... 

During last decade, the electricity demand in Iran grows up more than 8% per year due to an increasing economic growth. The main part of this load growth is related to industrial and agricultural demand. At this period, electric utilities tried to provide the peak load demand using all different types of available generating units especially with hydro generation plants. However, moving the time of peak demand occurring from night hours to day time and also increasing of load demand at mid day hours, created a new challenge to hydro-generation planning. As the number of daily peak hours increases from the nightly to daily peak hours and considering that Iran is a sub-tropical country, use of... 

In nonlinear static (pushover) methods of analysis as an alternative to time history analysis, the capacity curve of the structure is established with respect to the roof displacement. Disproportionate increases in the roof displacement and even outright reversals of the higher modes can distort the capacity curve of the equivalent single degree of freedom system in these kinds of method, including MPA. To overcome this problem, recently, "Energy-Based" the Modal Pushover Analysis (Energy-Based MPA) method has been introduced. In this method, the absorbed energy and/or the external work in the pushover analysis is considered. Accordingly, the assessment of the Energy-Based MPA method is... 

A variety of aromatic amines are oxidized to their corresponding quinones in excellent yields by supported iodic acid under microwave irradiation and solvent free conditions  

A simple, high yield, and short time method for nucleophilic displacement reaction of inactive aryl halides is reported. The reaction is performed in microwave oven under thermal condition with montmorillonite supported AgNO 3  

In this paper, we study a supply chain problem where a whole seller/producer distributes goods among different retailers. Such problems are always faces with uncertainty with input data and we have to use various techniques to handle the uncertainty. The proposed model of this paper considers different input parameters such as demand, capacity and cost in trapezoid fuzzy forms and using two ranking methods, we handle the uncertainty. The results of the proposed model of this paper have been compared with the crisp and other existing fuzzy techniques using some randomly generated data. The preliminary results indicate that the proposed models of this paper provides better values for the... 

The coupled three-dimensional flexural vibrations of a micro-rotating shaft–disk system, as a basic model for micro-engines, are investigated in this paper by considering small-scale effects utilizing the modified couple stress theory. Governing equations of motion are derived by the use of Hamilton’s principle. Then, implementing the Galerkin approach, an infinite set of ordinary differential equations is obtained for the system. With truncated two-term equations, expressions for the first two natural frequencies are written, and for the two corresponding modes, the maximum rotational speed up to which the system will be stable is analytically determined. Parametric studies on the results... 

In this work, some vibrational response parameters of strain gradient based micro-spinning Rayleigh beams with mass eccentricity distribution are investigated within infinitesimal deformation conditions. Governing equations of motion are derived utilizing the Hamilton’s principle. The gyroscopic effects and rotary inertia are both included in the formulation. By applying the Galerkin method, analytical expressions for natural frequencies of the micro beam in forward and backward whirl motions are obtained. In addition, an expression for the vibrational amplitude of the micro-beam due to mass eccentricity distribution is determined. Some numerical results are presented to study the effect of... 

In this study, several analytical expressions are obtained for the vibrational characteristics of a Jeffcott model for micro-rotor systems based on the strain gradient theory to investigate the small-scale effects on the model. The Jeffcott model consists of a massless microrotating shaft and a disk as a rotor with eccentricity. The disk is mounted on the middle of the shaft. Two second-order differential equations associated with the oscillating motion of the rotor in the plane perpendicular to the longitudinal axis are presented and transformed into a complex form. The stiffness of the system is determined by obtaining the deflection of a strain-gradient-based nonrotating microbeam...