Sharif Digital Repository

Public transport is amongst critical infrastructures in modern cities, especially megacities, home to millions of people. The reliability of these systems is highly crucial for both citizens and service providers. If service providers overlook system reliability, a considerable amount of expenses will be wasted. Several factors such as vehicle failure, accident, lack of budget weather factors, and traffic congestion cause unreliability, among which vehicle failure plays a prominent role. The brake system is the most vulnerable and vital component of a public transportation bus. Brake reliability depends on driver's expertise, component quality, passenger loading, line situation, etc.... 

Since the beginning of industrial age the atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases has been increased significantly due to excessive use of fossil fuels. An effective way for decreasing emission of greenhouse gases is injection of CO2 in geological formations. Moreover, from the reservoir engineering point of view, CO2 injection has been considered as a method of enhancing oil and gas recovery. While using CO2 for enhanced oil recovery (EOR) has been the subject of several studies in the past decades, enhanced gas recovery (EGR) has not been fully studied in the gas reservoirs, mainly because of high recovery factor of gas reservoirs and mixing of the reservoir gas and CO2. In this... 

In this paper, results of an investigation on strain hardening mechanisms of aged AEREX350 alloy during room temperature compression testing are reported. TEM studies were conducted on commercial samples aged at 850 °C both before and after deformation in a strain range of 0.15-0.27. It was found that only coherent γ′ precipitates with L12 structure formed in these samples prior to deformation. TEM studies also showed twin intersections in the deformed samples. Based on these observations, it is suggested that the high strain hardening rate of the aged material in this strain range is mainly related to the formation of intersecting deformation twins. This is attributed to the decrease in the... 

Understanding and investigation of a high-speed craft dynamics, their longitudinal dynamic instabilities in calm water and behavior in waves are of a great importance. Determination of motion equation coefficients will help to analyze the dynamics of these kinds of vessels and the factors affecting their dynamic stabilities. Therefore, it could be useful in controlling the vessel instabilities. The main purpose of this research is to determine the coefficients of longitudinal motions of a planing catamaran using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and evaluating the interceptor effect on hydrodynamic coefficients of that, which is widely utilized in controlling the motions of a high-speed... 

Introduction: The COVID-19 pandemic has considerably affected human beings most of whom are healthcare workers (HCWs) combating the disease in the front line. Methods: This cross-sectional study aims to explore the effects of stress and anxiety caused by COVID-19 on the quality of sleep and life in HCWs, including physicians, nurses, and other healthcare staff. In this global study, we asked 1,210 HCWs (620 and 590 volunteers from Iran and European countries, including Germany, the Netherlands, and Italy, respectively), who age 21–70, to participate in the test. Several measures of COVID-related stress, anxiety, sleep, and life quality, including the 12-item General Health Questionnaire... 

Determination of high-speed crafts’ hydrodynamic coefficients will help to analyze the dynamics of these kinds of vessels and the factors affecting their dynamic stabilities. Also, it can be useful and effective in controlling the vessel instabilities. The main purpose of this study is to determine the coefficients of longitudinal motions of a planing catamaran with and without a hydrofoil using RANS method to evaluate the foil effects on them. Determination of hydrodynamic coefficients by experimental approach is costly, and requires meticulous laboratory equipment; therefore, utilizing numerical methods and developing a virtual laboratory seems highly efficient. In the present study, the... 

Determination of high-speed crafts' hydrodynamic coefficients will help to analyze the dynamics of these kinds of vessels and the factors affecting their dynamic stabilities. Also, it can be useful and effective in controlling the vessel instabilities. The main purpose of this study is to determine the coefficients of longitudinal motions of a planing catamaran with and without a hydrofoil using Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes method to evaluate the foil effects on them. Determination of hydrodynamic coefficients by experimental approach is costly and requires meticulous laboratory equipment; therefore, utilizing the numerical methods and developing a virtual laboratory seem highly... 

Schramm-Loewner evolution (SLE) is a stochastic process that helps classify critical statistical models using one real parameter K. Numerical study of SLE often involves curves that start and end on the real axis. To reduce numerical errors in studying the critical curves which start from the real axis and end on it, we have used hydrodynamically normalized SLE(K,P) which is a stochastic differential equation governing such curves. In this paper, we directly verify this hypothesis and numerically apply this formalism to the domain wall curves of the Abelian sandpile model (K= 2) and critical percolation (K= 6). We observe that this method is more reliable than previously used methods in the... 

Avalanche frontiers in Abelian sandpile model (ASM) are random simple curves whose continuum limit is known to be a Schramm-Loewner evolution with diffusivity parameter κ=2. In this paper we consider the dissipative ASM and study the statistics of the avalanche and wave frontiers for various rates of dissipation. We examine the scaling behavior of a number of functions, such as the correlation length, the exponent of distribution function of loop lengths, and the gyration radius defined for waves and avalanches. We find that they do scale with the rate of dissipation. Two significant length scales are observed. For length scales much smaller than the correlation length, these curves show... 

Background. Temporary artery clipping facilitates safe cerebral aneurysm management, besides a risk for cerebral ischemia. We developed an artificial neural network (ANN) to predict the safe clipping time of temporary artery occlusion (TAO) during intracranial aneurysm surgery. Method. We devised a three-layer model to predict the safe clipping time for TAO. We considered age, the diameter of the right and left middle cerebral arteries (MCAs), the diameter of the right and left A1 segment of anterior cerebral arteries (ACAs), the diameter of the anterior communicating artery, mean velocity of flow at the right and left MCAs, and the mean velocity of flow at the right and left ACAs, as well... 

In the band structure analysis of photonic crystals it is normally assumed that the full photonic gaps could be found by scanning high-symmetry paths along the edges of Irreducible Brillouin Zones (IBZ). We have recently shown [1] that this assumption is wrong in general for sufficiently symmetry breaking geometries, so that the IBZ is exactly half of the complete BZ. That minimal required symmetry arises from the requirement on time-reversal symmetry. In this paper we show that even that requirement might be broken by using gyro-magnetic materials in the composition of photonic structures we can observe that the IBZ extends fully to the boundaries of the complete BZ, that is IBZ must be as... 

Tensile and room temperature Charpy V-notch impact tests along with microstructural studies were used to evaluate the variations in the as-cast mechanical properties of low-carbon steels with and without vanadium and niobium. Tensile test results indicate that good combinations of strength and ductility can be achieved by microalloying additions. While the yield strength and UTS increase up to respectively 370-380 and 540-580 MPa in the microalloyed heats, their total elongation range from 20 to 25%. TEM studies revealed that random and interphase fine-scale microalloy precipitates play a major role in the strengthening of the microalloyed heats. On the other hand, microalloying additions... 

A highly efficient two-dimensional meta-reflect-array manipulating the phase and amplitude of far-infrared electromagnetic wave is proposed. The reflect array consists of patterned graphene nano-disks resides on a subwavelenght thick optical cavity to enhance the interaction of electromagnetic wave. It is shown that the reflected wave from each unit cell can almost cover the 2π range phase shift by changing the radius of the graphene nano-disks while at the same time maximizes its amplitude. Proposing a transmission line model for the proposed structure, we realize a meta lens as a flat optics functionality. © 2016 IEEE  

Effective and efficient methods in computational mechanics have been of interest for the designers and engineers in the last decade. A 3D super elements is developed and implemented for the free vibration analysis of the composite plates. These new elements have been constructed by a 2D super elements in the plane direction and p-version finite element in the thickness direction. Results of 2D super elements are comparable to SHELL 63 and results of 3D super elements with cubic polynomial are comparable to SHELL 93. In the thin plates, 2D super element (or SHELL 63) and 3D super elements (or SHELL 93) have same results, but in the thick plates results change drastically. Natural frequencies... 

Association mapping of genetic diseases has attracted extensive research interest during the recent years. However, most of the methodologies introduced so far suffer from spurious inference of the associated sites due to population inhomogeneities. In this paper, we introduce a statistical framework to compensate for this shortcoming by equipping the current methodologies with a state-of-the-art clustering algorithm being widely used in population genetics applications. The proposed framework jointly infers the disease-associated factors and the hidden population structures. In this regard, a Markov Chain-Monte Carlo (MCMC) procedure has been employed to assess the posterior probability... 

In general, decomposition methods can facilitate the process of solving sophisticated and heterogonous problems in the area of software development and engineering. These approaches are assisting to decompose problems based on different disciplines, characteristics and functionalities that is results into increasing the computational efficiency (e.g. parallel processing/computing) and accelerate the software changing process, software modifications and error tracking. Essentially, these approaches contribute to the degree of modularity to decompose a complex problem into different sub-problems and to focus on local objectives. There are different approaches that are used to decompose a... 

In this study, three different reusable photocatalysts containing different amino acids as a source of non-metals, including L-Arginine, L-Proline, and L-Methionine, have been synthesized for the first time. Using a kinetic study and degradation efficiency test, these visible driven photocatalysts were investigated for their photocatalytic activity in removing antibiotics, including metronidazole (MNZ) and cephalexin (CEX). The morphology, structure and optical properties of the fabricated catalysts were characterized by X-ray Powder Diffraction (XRD), Field Emission Scanning Electron Microscopy (FESEM), Energy Dispersive Spectrometry (EDS)/mapping, Fourier-Transform Infrared Spectroscopy... 

The unpredictable nature and devastating impact of earthquakes enforce governments of disaster-prone regions to provide practical response plans to minimize damage and losses resulting from earthquakes. Logistics management is one of the key issues that should be considered for an appropriate response, in particular, the planning of the transport of commodities required during response and the evacuation of injured people. This paper develops a dynamic model for dispatching and routing vehicles in response to an earthquake. We focus on the transport of both commodity towards affected areas and injured people to hospitals. The proposed model is capable of receiving updated information at any...