Sharif Digital Repository

The powerful non-classical continuum theory of strain gradient elasticity is capable of effectively capturing small-scale effects in micro-structures. Based on this theory, a formulation is developed to investigate the coupled torsional-flexural vibrations of micro-rotors in the presence of inertia nonlinearities arising from the eccentricity and gyroscopic motion of the rotors. With the aid of a weighted-residual technique, coupled nonlinear partial differential equations of motion are truncated into a discrete model. Then, the resonance of the fundamental mode of the torsional vibration excited by the flexural vibration is investigated by utilizing the perturbation method of multiple... 

Reliability assessment is of primary importance in designing and planning distribution systems that operate in an economical manner with minimal interruption of customer loads. Distributed generation (DG) is expected to play an increasing role in emerging power systems because they use different type of resources and technologies to serve energy to power systems. DG is expected to improve the system reliability as its backup generation. Since DG units are subject to failures as all other generation units, the random behavior of these units must be taken into account in the analysis. Existence of DG units in a distribution system will effect on restoration time of load points. In this paper,... 

The present experimental study investigated the behavior of hot-mix asphalt (HMA) under repetitive creep and recovery loading. Cylindrical samples of HMA were subjected to trapezoidal and haversine loading followed by unloading. Different amounts of unloading (stress reduction) and relaxation periods (rest periods in complete unloading) were tested. The measured vertical deformation was decomposed into viscoelastic and viscoplastic components. It was observed for cyclic loading that an increase in unloading and/or relaxation period increased the recovery of viscoelastic strain, which in turn increased the accumulated viscoplastic strain in subsequent loading cycles. It appears that... 

In this research, the small-scale effects in the torsional vibration of the micro-rotors with eccentric micro-disks are investigated based on the modified couple stress theory. The torsional deformation of the micro-shaft described by function φ(x,t) is considered to be independent of the flexural deformation described by functions v(x,t) and w(x,t). Using Hamilton's principle, the system of coupled nonlinear governing partial differential equations of motion and the associated boundary conditions are derived. The system of equations includes one corresponding to the torsional deformation and two others corresponding to the flexural deformation. By employing the Galerkin method, the system... 

Through the strategic highway research program (SHRP) project, time-temperature superposition (TTS) was used to reduce the loading time of bending beam rheometer (BBR) test. Based on TTS, stiffness of the asphalt binder after a two-hour loading time is similar to that after 60 s at 10 °C above. This study attempted to evaluate the TTS validity using finite element (FE) method by developing master curves in a broad range of low temperatures. The results indicated that TTS was neither valid for modified asphalt binders nor for neat binder. Also, in addition to the loading time dependency of m-value, limiting values of stiffness and m-value find no rheological acceptance. As a remedy, thermally... 

Cyclic loading on asphalt concrete materials with a longer relaxation time and lower remaining stress lead to higher viscoelastic strain recovery. Consequently, more aggregate reorientation occurs and the rate of viscoplastic strain increases in subsequent cycles. The present study proposes a hardening relaxation constitutive relationship (fHR) as a function of accumulated recovered viscoelastic strain εrve based on experimental observation. This model captures the initiation and evolution of hardening-relaxation during the relaxation time and/or stress reduction under cyclic loading. The model was then coupled with viscoelastic, viscoplastic and viscodamage constitutive relationships. The... 

The capacity factor is an important wind turbine parameter which is ratio of average output electrical power to rated electrical power of the wind turbine. Another main factor, the AEP, the annual energy production, can be determined using wind characteristics and wind turbine performance. Lower rated power may lead to higher capacity factor but will reduce the AEP. Therefore, it is important to consider simultaneously both the capacity factor and the AEP in design or selecting a wind turbine. In this work, a new semi-empirical secondary capacity factor is introduced for determining a rated wind speed at which yearly energy and hydrogen production obtain a maximum value. This capacity factor... 

An improved incompressible smoothed particle hydrodynamics (ISPH) method is presented, which employs first-order consistent discretization schemes both for the first-order and second-order spatial derivatives. A recently introduced wall boundary condition is implemented in the context of ISPH method, which does not rely on using dummy particles and, as a result, can be applied more efficiently and with less computational complexity. To assess the accuracy and computational efficiency of this improved ISPH method, a number of two-dimensional incompressible laminar internal flow benchmark problems are solved and the results are compared with available analytical solutions and numerical data.... 

Asphalt binder is responsible for the thermo-viscoelastic mechanical behavior of asphalt concrete. Upon application of pure compressive stress to an asphalt concrete specimen, the stress is transferred by mechanisms such as aggregate interlock and the adhesion/cohesion properties of asphalt mastic. In the pure tensile stress mode, aggregate interlock plays a limited role in stress transfer, and the mastic phase plays the dominant role through its adhesive/cohesive and viscoelastic properties. Under actual combined loading patterns, any coordinate direction may experience different stress modes; therefore, the mechanical behavior is not the same in the different directions and the asphalt... 

In this research, surface modification of aromatic polyamide thin film composite (TFC) reverse osmosis (RO) membranes was carried out using dielectric barrier discharge (DBD) plasma treatment to improve the performance and fouling resistance of prepared RO membranes. First, polyamide TFC RO membranes were synthesized via interfacial polymerization of m-phenylenediamine and trimesoyl chloride monomers over microporous polysulfone support membrane. Next, the DBD plasma treatment with 15 s, 30 s, 60 s, and 90 s duration was used for surface modification. The surface properties of RO membranes were characterized by attenuated total reflectance Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (ATR-FTIR),... 

Asphalt binder is responsible for the thermo-viscoelastic mechanical behavior of asphalt concrete. Upon application of pure compressive stress to an asphalt concrete specimen, the stress is transferred by mechanisms such as aggregate interlock and the adhesion/cohesion properties of asphalt mastic. In the pure tensile stress mode, aggregate interlock plays a limited role in stress transfer, and the mastic phase plays the dominant role through its adhesive/cohesive and viscoelastic properties. Under actual combined loading patterns, any coordinate direction may experience different stress modes; therefore, the mechanical behavior is not the same in the different directions and the asphalt... 

In this research, surface modification of aromatic polyamide thin film composite (TFC) reverse osmosis (RO) membranes was carried out using dielectric barrier discharge (DBD) plasma treatment to improve the performance and fouling resistance of prepared RO membranes. First, polyamide TFC RO membranes were synthesized via interfacial polymerization of m-phenylenediamine and trimesoyl chloride monomers over microporous polysulfone support membrane. Next, the DBD plasma treatment with 15 s, 30 s, 60 s, and 90 s duration was used for surface modification. The surface properties of RO membranes were characterized by attenuated total reflectance Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (ATR-FTIR),... 

In this work, molecular dynamic simulation of the mixture of imidazolium based ionic liquids with alcohols is implemented in order to investigate mixing excess properties and some structural and physical properties of the mixture. Excess volumes and enthalpies are evaluated for 11 different mole fractions of ionic liquids at each 0.1, in the range of 0 to 1. Radial distribution function, cohesive energy density, potential of mean force, solvation energy, and diffusion coefficient are reported and analysed. The effects of the cationic alkyl chain length, in comparison with changes of the anions, on these properties are reported. Results reveal that the methanol molecule participates with its... 

The application of the solar energy in thermal desalination devices is one of the most beneficial applications of the renewable energies. In this study, a novel solar desalination system is introduced, which is benefited from the undeniable advantages of pulsating heat pipe (PHP) as a fast responding, flexible and high performance thermal conducting device. Results show a remarkable increase in the rate of desalinated water production and the maximum production reaches up to 875mL/(m2.h). However, the optimum water depth in basin and the filling ratio of the PHP are measured 1cm and 40%, respectively  

This paper proposes a scalable speech coding scheme using the embedded matrix quantization of the LSFs in the LPC model. For an efficient quantization of the spectral parameters, two types of codebooks of different sizes are designed and used to encode unvoiced and mixed voicing segments separately. The tree-like structured codebooks of our embedded quantizer, constructed through a cell merging process, help to make a fine-grain scalable speech coder. Using an efficient adaptive dual-band approximation of the LPC excitation, where voicing transition frequency is determined based on the concept of instantaneous frequency in the frequency domain, near natural sounding synthesized speech is... 

This paper introduces a novel scalable speech coding scheme based on embedded matrix quantization of LSF parameters in an LPC model. In the proposed quantizer, codewords are organized based on a tree structure through a cell-merging process, which leads to a fine-grain scalable coder at rates below 900 bps. Near natural sounding is achieved at very low rates by employing an efficient adaptive dual-band scheme to approximate the LPC excitation signals. Evaluation results, obtained from both overall quality measurement and intelligibility assessment, show that the proposed coder could be a reasonable choice for improving the bottom-line speech quality in low bit rates. © 2008 IEEE  

One of the main issues with data hiding algorithms is capacity of data embedding. Most of data hiding methods suffer from low capacity that could make them inappropriate in certain hiding applications. This paper presents a high capacity data hiding method that uses encryption and the multi-band speech synthesis paradigm. In this method, an encrypted covert message is embedded in the unvoiced bands of the speech signal that leads to a high data hiding capacity of tens of kbps in a typical digital voice file transmission scheme. The proposed method yields a new standpoint in design of data hiding systems in the sense of three major, basically conflicting requirements in steganography, i.e.... 

This paper analytically studies the effect of functionally graded materials (FGMs) on the primary resonances of large amplitude flexural vibration of in-extensional rotating shafts with nonlinear curvature as well as nonlinear inertia. The constituent material is assumed to vary along the radial direction according to a power-law gradation. The governing differential equations and the corresponding boundary conditions are derived employing the variational approach. Then, the Galerkin method and the multiple scales perturbation method are utilized to obtain the frequency–response equation. In a numerical case study, the effects of the power-law index on the steady-state responses and locus of... 

This paper addresses a new approach to data hiding that leads to a high data embedding rate of tens of kbps in a typical digital voice file transmission scheme. The purpose of the proposed method is restricted to offline voice transmission that uses stego speech files in wave format. The basic idea of the algorithm is to embed encrypted covert message in the unvoiced bands of spectrum of the cover speech. Inaudibility of the proposed hiding scheme is investigated through both support vector machines (SVM)-based steganalysis and the ITU-T P.862 PESQ standard speech quality assessment. The results assure imperceptibility and transparency of the stego speech