Sharif Digital Repository

There are very limited researches carried out to investigate the influence of saturation degrees, freezing-thawing, and curing times on geotechnical properties of lime concrete (LC) and lime-cement concrete (LCC) due to the capillary action and changes in groundwater table. Subsequently, the primary goal of this research is to investigate the influence of these parameters on mechanical properties of LC and LCC using unconfined compression tests, namely uniaxial compressive strength (UCS), stress-strain behavior, deformability index (I D ), secant modulus (E S ), failure strain, bulk modulus (K), resilient modulus (M R ), brittleness index (I B ), and shear modulus (G). At first, the... 

A new resonance phenomenon is discussed and demonstrated by experiment in a dual-polarization cavity. The resonance is formed by waves bouncing between two anisotropic metasurfaces placed at the cavity ends. The simple metasurfaces are designed to preserve the handedness of circularly polarized waves upon reflection. The standing waves resulting from such reflections do not have nodes and antinodes. A theoretical solution to the resonance condition is discussed, both for plane-waves and equivalent guided waves. The concept is then experimentally applied to dual-mode guided waves, demonstrating a very short cavity at X-band. This brings new possibilities for resonator design and can... 

A new resonance phenomenon is demonstrated in waveguide cavities, which simultaneously uses two orthogonal modes (polarizations). This resonance is formed by bouncing waves with similar handedness, between two simple anisotropic metasurfaces having a relative rotation angle. The rotated anisotropic metasurfaces can cross couple the waves from one polarization to the other at the cavity end. The field profile of the resonant mode does not exhibit nodes and antinodes, thus the resonant frequency is not solely determined by the cavity length, unlike common resonators. The resonance condition is theoretically demonstrated from both field and transmission line perspectives, and is validated by... 

Contact wires are critical components of railway overhead infrastructure which provide power for trains. This paper proposes an innovative method to determine the service life of worn contact wires under three failure modes: tension, fatigue, and attrition. The tensile stress, fatigue damage, and cross-section loss of contact wire have been modelled as stochastic processes following lognormal distribution. The first-passage probability method is then used to determine the time-dependent failure probability for contact wires under each failure mode. The service life of the contact wire is determined through system reliability analysis. This method has then been applied to a case study to... 

We propose a component model for the scheduling of combined-cycle gas turbine (CCGT) units by mixed-integer programming (MIP) in which combustion turbines (CTs) and steam turbines (STs) are modeled as individual units. The hourly schedule of CCGT based on the component model is compared with that of the mode model. The modeling of modes, which includes a combination of CTs and STs, would require certain approximations for representing fuel input-power output curves, ramping rate limits, minimum operating time limits, etc. The approximations can result in sub-optimal schedules. Furthermore, the commitment and dispatch of CCGTs based on the mode model will require a real-time dispatch to... 

The open or in-filled trenches are often used in engineering practice to mitigate ground vibration induced by different types of vibration sources. A novel approach which is considering the effect of Rayleigh wavelength on the efficiency of open and in-filled trenches coupled with regular specific normalized dimensions was implemented in this study. While impact loading is a very common type of loading (in, e.g., machine foundations, driven pile installation), it was rarely studied in the past. The loading is selected to consist of 12 impact pulses. In this study, it was shown that Rayleigh wavelength controls the effect of trench-normalized dimensions on its performance, and therefore,... 

Accurate monthly electricity consumption forecasting (ECF) can help retailers enhance the profitability in deregulated electricity markets. Most current methods use monthly load data to perform monthly ECF, which usually produces large errors due to insufficient training samples. A few methods try to use fine-grained smart-meter data (e.g., hourly data) to increase training samples. However, such methods still exhibit low accuracy due to the increase in forecasting steps. © 1975-2012 IEEE  

Power generation consumes a substantial amount of water in the power industry. In order to address the impact of water consumption restriction on the power generation, this paper proposes a security-constrained unit commitment (SCUC) formulation considering water consumption impact as an additional constraint. To this end, the water consumption in power plants is formulated. Consequently, the SCUC is extended to consider the consumed water volume as a restricting factor. A procedure is introduced to investigate the most appropriate point of power generation operation to save a vital amount of water by raising reasonable generation costs. The objective of the proposed model is to minimize the... 

Let G be a graph with vertex set (Formula presented.) and (Formula presented.) be an (Formula presented.) matrix whose (Formula presented.) -entry is the maximum number of internally edge-disjoint paths between (Formula presented.) and (Formula presented.), if (Formula presented.), and zero otherwise. Also, define (Formula presented.), where D is a diagonal matrix whose i-th diagonal element is the number of edge-disjoint cycles containing (Formula presented.), whose (Formula presented.) is a multiple of J−I. Among other results, we determine the spectrum and the energy of the matrix (Formula presented.) for an arbitrary bicyclic graph G. © 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor &... 

Let G be a graph with vertex set (Formula presented.) and (Formula presented.) be an (Formula presented.) matrix whose (Formula presented.) -entry is the maximum number of internally edge-disjoint paths between (Formula presented.) and (Formula presented.), if (Formula presented.), and zero otherwise. Also, define (Formula presented.), where D is a diagonal matrix whose i-th diagonal element is the number of edge-disjoint cycles containing (Formula presented.), whose (Formula presented.) is a multiple of J−I. Among other results, we determine the spectrum and the energy of the matrix (Formula presented.) for an arbitrary bicyclic graph G. © 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor &... 

This paper aims to develop a deteriorated bridge maintenance strategy that ensures the safe operation of steel structures and minimizes the total risk. Five common failure modes are considered for the deteriorated bridge: flexure, shear, deflection, fatigue failure for girder, and chloride attack for the concrete deck. Time-dependent and system reliability analyses are carried out to find the probability of failure under these failure modes. Risk-cost optimization is then used to determine the maintenance strategy. This method was applied to a working example. It was found that the developed maintenance strategy can predict when, where, and what to maintain for a bridge to ensure its safe... 

Competition in the electric power industry urges utilities to not only reduce the investment costs, but also to reasonably cut the operation and maintenance expenses as much as possible, while keeping both power quality and reliability requirements met. Reliability-centred maintenance (RCM) has been proven to be in response to this dilemma in power systems and has been yet successfully applied in various engineering contexts. This study introduces a novel approach, as of the first steps of RCM implementation in composite power generation and transmission systems, to identify the critical components for the main sake of a more focused maintenance management. Criticality evaluation is, here,... 

In this study, a novel double-layer microwave absorber was designed based on the MWCNTs/La0.6Sr0.4Mn0.5Fe0.5O4 (C/LSMFO) and PEDOT-coated (P@[C/LSMFO]) nanocomposites. Co-precipitation and in-situ polymerization methods were utilized to synthesize the C/LSMFO and P@[C/LSMFO] nanocomposites, respectively. XRD, FESEM, VSM, and VNA analysis were used to determine the structural, morphological, magnetic, and electromagnetic properties of the nanocomposites. Single-layer absorbers with thicknesses of 1, 1.5, and 2 mm were fabricated, and electromagnetic parameters were evaluated via VNA in the X-band frequency. Moreover, the microwave absorbing features of the double-layer absorber with various... 

Sustainable development is significantly contributing the environmental degradation due to improvements in financial sector in One Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) region. Thus, the present research work constructs the sustainable development index for BRI. Afterwards, it unfolds the nexus of sustainable development-environmental degradation and also evaluates the role of financial development indicators in BRI economies. By utilizing the robust mean group, the present study quantifies the long-run marginal impacts of sustainable development, financial development indicators, energy consumption, and urban sprawl on environmental degradation, respectively. The marginal impacts infer an inverted... 

TiO2 is a promising photoanode material for photoelectrochemical (PEC) water splitting, but its severe bulk recombination of photogenerated carriers, sluggish oxygen evolution reaction (OER) kinetics and poor visible light response are the main bottleneck problems. Here, the carbon quantum dots (CQDs) modified anatase/rutile TiO2 photoanode (CQDs/A/R-TiO2) was designed by growth of anatase TiO2 nanothorns on rutile TiO2 nanorods and further surface modification of CQDs. The results revealed that the A/R-TiO2 heterojunction significantly suppressed the bulk recombination of photogenerated carriers. With further incorporation of CQDs into A/R-TiO2, dramatical improvement of OER kinetics and... 

How can we optimally trade extra computing power to reduce the communication load in distributed computing? We answer this question by characterizing a fundamental tradeoff between computation and communication in distributed computing, i.e., the two are inversely proportional to each other. More specifically, a general distributed computing framework, motivated by commonly used structures like MapReduce, is considered, where the overall computation is decomposed into computing a set of “Map” and “Reduce” functions distributedly across multiple computing nodes. A coded scheme, named “Coded Distributed Computing” (CDC), is proposed to demonstrate that increasing the computation load of the... 

How can we optimally trade extra computing power to reduce the communication load in distributed computing? We answer this question by characterizing a fundamental tradeoff between computation and communication in distributed computing, i.e., the two are inversely proportional to each other. More specifically, a general distributed computing framework, motivated by commonly used structures like MapReduce, is considered, where the overall computation is decomposed into computing a set of “Map” and “Reduce” functions distributedly across multiple computing nodes. A coded scheme, named “coded distributed computing” (CDC), is proposed to demonstrate that increasing the computation load of the... 

We consider a wireless distributed computing system, in which multiple mobile users, connected wirelessly through an access point, collaborate to perform a computation task. In particular, users communicate with each other via the access point to exchange their locally computed intermediate computation results, which is known as data shuffling. We propose a scalable framework for this system, in which the required communication bandwidth for data shuffling does not increase with the number of users in the network. The key idea is to utilize a particular repetitive pattern of placing the data set (thus a particular repetitive pattern of intermediate computations), in order to provide the... 

In this study, the existence of a sinusoidal splitter on the formation and distribution of hydrogen and air co-jets are investigated in a dual-combustion ramjet engine. The main scope of this research is to analyze the comprehensive flow structure and flame features directly downstream of the sinusoidal splitter. In this work, shockwave/shear-layer interactions behind the sinusoidal splitter are thoroughly studied through a computational fluid dynamic approach. Two different splitter profiles are compared with a simple splitter to demonstrate the main effects of multi shock wave interactions on fuel distribution and penetrations. To simulate co-air jet, Reynolds Average Navier-Stocks...