Sharif Digital Repository

Economic policies for managing agricultural water use are often complicated by the challenge of using water prices as an efficient economic tool when other non-economic concerns are involved in the decision-making process. This study aims to analyse the impact of water pricing policies on preserving agricultural water resources in Iran. This study applies a system dynamics approach to simulate the system performance and behaviour of stakeholders and the economic implications. Our finding shows that water pricing policies will likely fail due to low water price elasticity and if there are lack of institutional and physical infrastructure, alternative professions, manufacturing technology,... 

The purpose of this paper is to quantify the extent of damage of rectangular reinforced concrete shear walls after an earthquake using surface crack patterns. One of the most important tasks after an earthquake is to assess the safety and classify the performance level of buildings. This assessment is usually performed by visual inspection that is prone to significant errors. In this research, an extensive database on the images of damaged rectangular reinforced concrete shear walls is collected from the literature. This database includes more than 200 images from experimental quasi-static cyclic tests. Using the concept of fractal geometry, several probabilistic models are developed by... 

Hot compression tests were carried out on a Fe-29Ni-17Co alloy in the temperature range of 900 °C to 1200 °C and at strain rates of 0.001-1 s-1. Dynamic recrystallization was found responsible for flow softening during hot compression. The flow behavior was successfully analyzed by the hyperbolic sine equation and the corresponding material constants A, n and α were determined. The value of apparent activation energy was determined as 423 kJ/mol. The peak and steady state strains showed simple power-law dependence on the Zener-Hollomon parameter. The dynamic recrystallization kinetics was analyzed using Avrami equation and the corresponding exponent was determined to be about 2.7. This... 

Iranian water authority has recently announced that one of the effective ways to avoid unprecedented high water consumption in Iran's agriculture sector is to increase water price. This paper analyzes the feasibility of this policy by using a hydro-economic approach with the aim to consider the role of water pricing in agricultural water management. Such an analysis was conducted through comparing price of water consumed for producing selected agricultural crops (i.e. wheat, sugar beets, onion, tomato, barley, potato, corn, alfalfa hay and watermelon) in a case study on two provinces (East Azarbaijan and West Azarbaijan) in Iran to that in the state of California (CA) in the USA. According... 

This research presents a technique to recover the dispersion curves of guided-waves by utilizing the inherent sparsity of these signals in the frequency-wavenumber domain. The proposed methodology is a data-driven approach that combines physics-based knowledge with high-dimensional analysis to obtain the dispersion curves of the medium from experimental signals. Initially, a sparse two-dimensional dispersion matrix is constructed using sparse wavenumber analysis. Then, B-splines are fitted to non-zero elements of this matrix to establish an initial estimate of the dispersion curve parameters. These parameters are further optimized using the quasi-Newton algorithm to improve the accuracy of... 

In this work a new method for analyzing nanostructured materials has been proposed to accelerate the simulations for solid crystalline materials. The proposed Structural Approximation Method (SAM) is based on Molecular Dynamics (MD) and the accuracy of the results can also be improved in a systematic manner by sacrificing the simulation speed. In this method a virtual material is used instead of the real one, which has less number of atoms and therefore fewer degrees of freedom, compared to the real material. The number of differential equations that must be integrated in order to specify the state of the system will decrease significantly, and the simulation speed increases. To generalize... 

Computer networks courses are hard to teach as there are many details in the protocols and techniques involved that are difficult to grasp. Employing programming assignments as part of the course helps students to obtain a better understanding and gain further insight into the theoretical lectures. In this paper, the Partov simulation engine and experience using this engine in a computer networks course are discussed. Since 2009, various programming assignments based on the Partov system have been set to help students in their learning process. Student feedback has been very good; this has been quantified in two surveys in which a majority of students expressed their satisfaction with this... 

Network protocol design and evaluation requires either full implementation of the considered protocol and evaluation in a real network, or a simulation based on a model. There is also a middle approach in which both simulation and emulation are used to evaluate a protocol. In this article the Partov engine, which provides both simulation and emulation capabilities simultaneously, is presented. Partov benefits from a layered and platform-independent architecture. As a pure simulator, it provides an extensible plugin-based platform that can be configured to perform both real-time and non-real-time discrete-event simulations. It also acts as an emulator, making interaction with real networks... 

In this work a new method for analyzing nanostructured materials has been proposed to accelerate the simulations for solid crystalline materials. The proposed Structural Approximation Method (SAM) is based on Molecular Dynamics (MD) and the accuracy of the results can also be improved in a systematic manner by sacrificing the simulation speed. In this method a virtual material is used instead of the real one, which has less number of atoms and therefore fewer degrees of freedom, compared to the real material. The number of differential equations that must be integrated in order to specify the state of the system will decrease significantly, and the simulation speed increases. To generalize... 

In this paper we present a new exact solution for scalar field with cosmological constant in cylindrical symmetry Associated cosmological models including a model that describes a cyclic universe are discussed  

Emergence of instrumentation frameworks has vastly contributed to the software engineering practices. As the instrumentation use cases become more complex, complexity of instrumenting programs also increases, leading to a higher risk of software defects, increased development time, and decreased maintainability. In security applications such as symbolic execution and taint analysis, which need to instrument a large number of instruction types, this complexity is prominent. This paper presents an architecture based on the Pin binary instrumentation framework to abstract the low-level OS and hardware-dependent implementation details, facilitate code reuse in heavyweight instrumentation use... 

Too much effort has been done for manipulating individual atoms, using nano-manipulators and Scanning Tunneling Microscopes (STM). On the other hand, characterization and manipulation of nano-flows is of great concern. In the current work a molecular valve has been considered, which is made up of six atoms placed on the circumstance of a circle. A fuzzy controller has been designed for controlling the diameter of this molecular valve. The designed fuzzy controller used singleton fuzzifier, Mamdani inference engine, center average defuzzifier and exponential membership functions. A model based on the classical Molecular Dynamics (MD) is used for modeling the nano-system and passing the states... 

The stress distribution on open-ended Carbon Nanotubes (CNTs) embedded in a composite material is considered in this work and an analytical solution for the stress distribution has been obtained. The effects of CNT's thickness and CNT's length on the distribution of stress have been investigated. To find the governing relations, continuity equations of the axisymmetric problem in cylindrical coordinate (r,o,z) are used. Under some assumptions, the governing equations are solved and by using constitutive equations and applying the boundary conditions, an equation which relates the stress applied to the representative volume element with the stress distribution on the CNT, has been found. The... 

The idea of pure coupled mode approach is extended to the analysis of volume grating structures. In this approach, diffraction orders inside the grating are expanded over TE and TM components and unperturbed wavevectors are used instead of Floquet wavevectors of conventional coupled wave approach. Coupling between these orders are considered to model the diffraction. Three-dimensional grating structures are analyzed, and comparisons with rigorous coupled wave analysis are made to verify the accuracy and determine the range of applicability of the proposed method. © 2004 IEEE  

An improved coupled wave approach is presented for the analysis of diffraction behavior of a two-dimensional spatially periodic or almost periodic dielectric layer illuminated by TE polarized plane waves. This method applies to any simultaneous composition of arbitrarily modulated planar transmission gratings with any permittivity in neighboring regions. Two major improvements have been made. In the first part, the eigenvalues and eigenvectors of coupled wave system of equations are first-order corrected to reduce the inherent errors generated by neglecting second-order derivatives. In the second part, a scattering matrix method is used to model the effect of boundaries. Using this method,... 

Analog computing has emerged as a promising candidate for real-time and parallel continuous data processing. This article presents a reciprocal way for realizing asymmetric optical transfer functions (OTFs) in the reflection side of the on-axis processing channels. It is rigorously demonstrated that the presence of cross-polarization exciting normal polarizabilities (CPENPs) of a reciprocal metasurface circumvents the famous challenge of Green's function approach in implementation of on-axis reflective optical signal processing while providing dual computing channels under orthogonal polarizations. Following a comprehensive theoretical discussion and as a proof of concept, an all-dielectric... 

The demand for a more efficient and targeted method for intranasal drug delivery has led to sophisticated device design, delivery methods, and aerosol properties. Due to the complex nasal geometry and measurement limitations, numerical modeling is an appropriate approach to simulate the airflow, aerosol dispersion, and deposition for the initial assessment of novel methodologies for better drug delivery. In this study, a CT-based, 3D-printed model of a realistic nasal airway was reconstructed, and airflow pressure, velocity, turbulent kinetic energy (TKE), and aerosol deposition patterns were simultaneously investigated. Different inhalation flowrates (5, 10, 15, 30, and 45 L/min) and... 

In Hypo-elastic constitutive models an objective rate of the Cauchy stress tensor is expressed in terms of the current state of the stress and the deformation rate tensor D in a way that the dependency on the latter is a homogeneously linear one. In this work, a type of grade-one hypo-elastic models (i.e. models with linear dependency of the hypo-elasticity tensor on the stress) is considered for isotropic materials based on the objective corotational rates of stress. A positive real parameter denoted by n is involved in the considered type. Different values can be selected for this parameter, each selection leads to a specific model within the class of grade-one hypo-elasticity. The spin of...