Sharif Digital Repository

Since the classical continuum theory fails to deal with the problems associated with defects, stress concentrators, and relevant deformation phenomena in solids, alternative approaches that can detect the atomistic nature of materials' fracture are required. The deficiency of the capture the size effect which yields delusively high values for some components of the stress field right on the edge of the stress concentrators, and its weakness in describing the complex interaction between small inhomogeneities, cracks and the like when they are only a few nanometers apart, are among some of the disadvantages of the classical approach. In recent years, however, atomistic methods are emerging to... 

Road construction and maintenance constitute a significant part of country-wide infrastructure development budget each year. This indicates the importance of planning and design of individual road alignment in reducing the development cost. This study presents a meta-heuristic algorithm based on the concept of electromagnetism, which explores and finds a good route between two given points within a three-dimensional (3-D) context. It defines the region in a continuous 3-D surface, identifies initial routes, which are directed and shaped toward better positions by the help of local and global search. The final good solution is fine-tuned to produce a better alignment. The behaviour of the... 

The goal of this thesis is modeling and simulation of aircraft landing motion in order to evaluate the performance of an optimal anti-skid brake system (ABS) for the main landing gears with friction effects. In this process, the aircraft 6DOF perturbed equations of motion augmented with pertinent friction and brake forces and moments have been utilized. Subsequently, the problem is formulated within the framework of an optimal LQR that has allowed for generation of control brake commands as well as aircraft landing performance at different landing conditions with and without the proposed ABS. The results demonstrate the proposed ABS has been effective in providing admissible landing... 

Due to the increase in the number of people interested in learning new languages, in recent years, multiple systems have been developed to teach new languages to those who are interested. These systems are called Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL). However, the most credible CALL systems, like Duolingo, do not support Persian. So the of this study is to design and implement one of the technical parts of CALL systems, the Computer Assisted Pronunciation Training(CAPT), which is the part responsible for evaluating the learners' input voice's pronunciation and generating appropriate score and feedback.In this study, good pronunciation means correct expression of words, correct... 

Spin-Transfer Torque Magnetic RAM (STT-MRAM) is the most promising nonvolatile memory to replace SRAM technology in the Last-Level Cache (LLC) due to its benefits such as high density, near-zero cell leakage, and immunity to soft errors.However, due to its high retention failure and read disturbance rates in the downscaled technologies and the low data access rate in the LLC and the high number of read accesses, retention failure and read disturbance have become the main reliability challenges for STT-MRAM cache memory. The existing approaches to overcome these challenges impose significant area and performance overhead or adversely affect the other types of failures. In this thesis, we... 

Traditional continuum theory of elasticity becomes remarkably inaccurate in the vicinity of singularities, and when the size eect is of concern. For example in the study of ultra-small objects and ultra-thin lms, near defects, near point of application of a concentrated load and as such, the classical solutions are not reliable. This work focuses on determination of the elastic elds of an edge dislocation near the grain boundary of two perfectly bonded nano-size crystals. It is proposed to study this problem in the context of surface/interface elasticity, and incorporate the eect of the grain boundary on the elastic elds. In contrast to the surface/interface elasticity theory, traditional... 

The  usual  continuum  theories  are  inadequate  in  predicting  the  mechanical  behavior of solids in presence of small defects and stress concentrators; it is well known that such continuum methods are unable to detect the change of the size of  the  inhomogeneities  and  defects.   For  these  reasons  various  augmented  continuum theories and strain gradient theories have been proposed in the literature. The major difficulty in implication of these theories lies in the lack of information  about  the  additional  material  constants.  For  fcc  metals,  for  calculation of the associated characteristic lengths which arise in first strain gradient  theory,  an ... 

It is well known that the classical continuum theory does not consider size effect in predicting material’s behavior, however at the micro and nano scales, this effect is not negligible and the classical theory has deficiencies at these scales. To take into account the size effect, higher order continuum theories introduce new material constants into the formulation. One famous version of these theories is couple stress which is applied in this research. This theory considers size effect of inhomogeneity by employing Characteristic length of materials. Quasi-static couple stress and classical dynamic approaches do not include explicitly the size of the material unit cell in the formulation... 

During recent years, many researches on meshfree methods to solve differential equations and crack problem have been accomplished, and acceptable results have been obtained. One of these methods which is widely used in fracture mechanics specially in problems including crack is RKPM (reproducing kernel particle method). RKPM is one of the modern numerical methods in solving differential equations that has been lately introduced and developed. In this method, the genuine response of the system is replaced with a good approximation of the real response called ‘Reproduced Function’. The formulation of this method obviates the need for discretizing the domain by meshing with elements. In this... 

It is proposed to obtain the mode I plastic zone size and shape at the crack-tip in a work-hardening material using reproducing kernel particle method (RKPM). RKPM is a meshless technology which has proven very useful for solving problems of fracture mechanics. Ramberg-Osgood stress-strain relation is assumed. In this project the crack-tip stress intensity factor (SIF) before and after formation of the plastic zone will be examined. To impose the essential boundary conditions, penalty method is used. To construct the shape functions in the vicinity of the crack and crack-tip, both the diffraction and visibility methods are employed. The effects of different dilation parameters on SIF under... 

During the past decade, element free methods have achieved great successes. One of these methods is the so called RKPM which has a suitable structure for use in fracture mechanics problems. Despite all characteristic abilities of element free methods; these methods due to their higher order continuous differentiable approximations fail to model discontinuous material properties of the subjected domains. In this study by improving the collocation method in RKPM treatment of such conditions have been achieved. Also in this study performance of a new meshfree method in fracture mechanics problems has been analyzed. GRKPM is one of these methods which its suitable accuracy and convergence has... 

Classical continuum mechanics fails to give an accurate solution near the crack tip, moreover, it implies that a solid is able to sustain an infinite stress at the Griffith-Inglis crack tips. Among other critical issues is the inability of classical approach to sense the size effect. For these reasons, for more in-depth understanding and accurate behavioral predictions, it is essential to develop some atomistic methods which properly accounts, not only for the structure but also the long and short range atomic interactions effectively. In this work the interaction of coated inhomogeneity and crack under polynomial loading is simulated by using the many body Rafii-Tabar and Sutton potential... 

By virtue of a robust and efficient method, the solution of triple and quadruple integral equations which are the keys of various mixed boundary value problems corresponding to half-space and full-space media is addressed. These multiple integral equations are reduced to a well-known Fredholm integral equation of the second kind. In order to write the governing integral equations of the problem, Green’s functions play an important role. Therefore, Green’s functions of homogeneous and non-homogeneous transversely isotropic media in the form of line integrals including Bessel functions are obtained. Three interesting mixed boundary value problems in transversely isotropic materials are... 

In this project the goal is to study where, when and how the cracks in the steel connection plate between beam and column initiate and how far would the crack grow before failure and how to detect crack initiation by utilizing piezoelectric sensors. In this analysis piezoelectric is placed in line of crack propagation for sensing strain and changing it to voltage. A thin plate with edge notch which is an ideal model of typical beam to column connection is assumed. The plate is subjected to a uniaxial uniform load. With the aid of ANSYS software, the plate is analyzed in both elastic and plastic stages. The strain-stress curve with kinematic hardening part is considered and modeled with... 

In this thesis one of the mesh-free methods called RKPM is employed to solve the differential equations of strain-gradient elasticity. To this end the corresponding weak form is laid down. Subsequently the relevant stiffness-matrix is obtained by discretization of the weak form. To be sure about the accuracy of the relations, the problem of a plate weakened by a hole under uniform far-field tension, for which the exact solution is available in the literature, is solved. The obtained numerical result is in good agreement with the solution of Eshel and Rosenfeld. Afterwards, a plate containing a crack of finite length subjected to uniform far-field tension (mode I) is considered. This problem... 

Reproducing kernel particle method (RKPM) is a meshfree method for solving various differential equations. RKPM is based on pure mathematics; therefore, it is in the center of attention of many scientists. One major problem in RKPM is satisfying the essential boundary conditions (EBCs) involving the derivative of the field function. This problem is considered herein and its solution is proposed. To this end, two actions should be undertaken. First, the concept of Hermitian interpolation is employed to add the derivative term to the reproducing equation of RKPM and a new meshless method called gradient RKPM (GRKPM) is introduced. Second, the corrected collocation method is modified so... 

The goal of a speaker diarization system is to detect the number of speakers of a conversation and also assign each segment of the conversation to one of the speakers. In these types of systems it is assumed that the identity of the speakers is completely unknown. Usually speaker diarization systems operate in an offline mode. The system assumes that it does have the whole conversation at hand and then it starts processing the conversation. This method is effective for applications like spoken document retrieval, but it is not applicable to speech/speaker recognition systems which require online operating. In this dissertation, an online speaker diarization system is implemented. This... 

The so-called moving least square reproducing kernel method (MLSRKM), which is a meshfree Galerkin method, has two special properties in comparison with its prior version, say moving least square method (MLSM): (i) stability in preserving completeness conditions to the desired order for a discrete reproducing formula due to implementation of shifted and scaled basis, (ii) use of more accurate quadrature weights in a discrete reproducing form, especially along boundaries. However, because of employing shifted basis in MLSRKM, some of enrichment techniques, specifically in the context of linear elastic fracture mechanics (LEFM) problems, cannot be applied to this method. Therefore, we are... 

Determination of the elastic fields associated with a spherical multiply-coated inhomogeneous inclusion is a problem of great interest among researchers. In this work a set consisting of N+1 concentric spherical domains is considered. Each domain is either isotropic or spherically isotropic and is functionally graded (FG) in the radial direction. The outermost spherical surface is subjected to nonuniform loading and the constituent phases are subjected to some prescribed nonuniform body force and eigenstrain fields. When the outermost domain is an unbounded medium with zero eigenstrain and body force fields then an N-phase multi-inhomogeneous inclusion problem is realized for which the...