Sharif Digital Repository

This work is an attempt toward an integrated preliminary design of solid rocket (SR) propulsion system for impulsive orbital maneuvers. In this regard a comparative study is initially performed classifying current space propulsion systems and along the goals of this thesis, solid rocket system was selected for our integrated approach. Subsequently, two integration schemes were studied that differed in the primacy of the two design tasks. This study directed our focus to initially size and design an ideal rocket engine and refine it through integration with the maneuver design. Utilizing the ideal rocket concept and its governing equations, a SR was designed to provide the required total... 

Land-use and transportation are inter-related, such that land-use may be used to control transportation. This study aims to design a suitable combination of the residential and service land-use on one side, and the transportation system on the other side. The model presented in this study has two external and internal levels, and its objective is to minimize the cost of residence, receiving goods and services, and transportation. The performance of any combination of spatial allocation of population and employment, as well as transportation, is evaluated by the internal level of the model which determines the interaction between population, employment, and transportation. This is done by a... 

Natural phenomena, such as earthquakes, floods, and hurricanes, have been, and will be, one major source of mankind disastrous problems. Mankindinterventions to relieve this heavy pressure on humanity have been divided into four categories: mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery. This study is in the response phase, and aims to find an optimal network to help people in the devastated part of a city, hit by a major earthquake. Such earthquakes demolish buildings over the people inside, causing them fatal harm and serious injuries. At the same time, they ruin the city infrastructures (life lines), including transportation networks, preventing flow of relief supply to reach to the... 

This research deals with the joint problem of reopening the roads closed after a disastrous natural event and the damaged area relief programming. While these two problems are connected to each other by the joint resources of ruins and debris removal, they are usually treated separately in the literature, and their solutions are sought in practice by the art of experienced authorities. This study formulates a dynamic tri-level integer programming problem to represent the two problems of Road Reopening and Relief, in which the crisis manager has the objective of minimizing the death tolls over a planning time interval. It identifies the roads for reopening at the first level; and the second... 

Governments are concurrently faced with two problems in Network Development Problem (NDP): limited resources to invest, and the economic justification of the candidate projects. Public- Private Participation (PPP) is a solution for the first problem, in which Build- Operate- Transfer (BOT) is a scheme to implement this partnership.This study formulates a NDP, in which two sources of funds back projects’ construction: that of the private investor and the public budget for this purpose. The problem is seen as bi-level optimization, with the upper level dealing with the government decisions on the level of participation (from 0 to 100 percent of the project costs), and the lower level being a... 

Earthquake is one of the deadliest natural hazards that has taken more than 400 thousand lives, only in the last decade. Iran is one of the countries that are at high risk of potential death toll resulting from such hazards, firstly because it is located in a potentially high-risk zone, the so-called earthquake belt and, secondly because of its problems in the management of disastrous situations (especially, pre-disaster management). Bam 2003 earthquake is one of the most painful experiences in this context. So, in this research, emphasizing on the practical use of optimization models, an existing model is applied on the damaged area of the Bam earthquake. The mentioned model considers the... 

Relaxing the underlying assumptions of transportation networks analysis and approaching to more realistic behavioral assumptions in route choice modeling, allows more precise predictions for equilibrium traffic pattern. Furthermore, enhancing the degree of sensitivity in modeling traffic equilibrium is crucial from planning perspective in the sense that it can make transportation analyst capable to evaluate and predict the impacts of a broad spectrum of supply and demand management policies. This research has concentrated on proposing some generalizations in route choice behavior modeling and relaxing some restrictive assumptions of the previous approaches in this area. Formally speaking, in... 

Variations in supply and demand of transportation, as well as those in the related environment, would cause daily variations in user travel time of transportation networks. This phenomenon particularly happen in morning travel time peaks, and make estimation of travel time highly unreliable. Morning peak passengers, whose timely presence at the destinations are highly important to them, prefer to choose paths that have minimum travel time and maximum reliability. Thus, the look at travel time pessimistically, and based on their experience, they put a margin of reliability to reach at timely at their destinations.
This study analysis such reliability margins based on the standard... 

Increasing demand for Gold in electronic devices and catalysts, and its high cost, makes it crucial to recover the Gold from waste electronic devices such as Printed Circuit Boards. In this research, recovery of Gold by hydrometallurgical process based on heating the scraps along with a strong oxidizing agent, Potassium Persulphate, which is “eco-friendly” or “green”process is concerned. Recovery of Gold achieved by simple filtration process following by washing with water and nitric acid in order to dissolve impurities such as Al and Sn. The systematical and analytical evaluation method of Taguchi quality engineering has been applied for the leaching to evaluate the optimal experimental... 

In this dissertation, initial conditions that cause chaotic movement in the relativistic restricted three body problem was obtained by the fast Lyapunov indicator and the time-frequency analysis. With general relativistic model, we can proceed with more accuracy in the design of stable orbit and this chaotic amplification effect could be used as a novel test of general relativity  

Thus far, there has been a great attraction toward the optimal flight path planning problem. Terrain following/avoidance (TF/TA) flight is one of the most significant applications of this issue. To prevent from detection by the radars, fighter aircrafts, cruise missiles and helicopters often have to fly as close as possible to the surface during the operations. Such types of maneuvers are much more demanding and effortful than to be designed and implemented by human. The optimal TF/TA guidance system design comprises three phases: optimal path planning, closed-loop control system design for trajectory tracking and sensor blending to match the onboard and measured terrain data. So far, the... 

Propulsive efficiency of flapping wings is optimized via a combination of flapping and elastic wing behavior. In this thesis, a complex complete model of flapping air vehicles (FAV) is developed in order to simulate the wing aeroelastic behavior. The resulting model is in the form of a complex set of partial differential equations whose solution is only numerically possible. Using the resulting simulation model, the different flapping behavior of the right and left wings can also be evaluated along with the resulting forces and moments that make the FAV flight realizable. One of the key flight conditions considered in many simulations is that of cruise flight. In order to have a... 

In this thesis the problem of spacecrafts formation control for halo orbit around the second libration point (L2) of the Sun-Earth Three Body (TB) system is investigated. Station keeping, reconfiguration and precision formation control of spacecrafts on halo orbits are performed via the use of the nonlinear Integral Sliding Mode (ISM) method, optimal closed loop Linear Quadratic regulator (LQR) approach as well as the Model Prodective Control (MPC). In this regard the nonlinear relative dynamics of deputy-chief spacecrafts are derived within the concept of both circular and elliptical three body problem; as well the perturbation model of the Moon and the linear model of restricted three... 

Rapid growth of space traffic and small satellite systems for current and future space missions have generated new enhanced performance requirements for navigation subsystem. As such, the navigation subsystem is considered as a vital part of all active satellite systems that effectively influences their successful missions. In this regard, the present work is dedicated on the subject of autonomous satellite navigation utilizing nonlinear filters, for which some laboratory experimentations have also been implemented. Generally, advanced orbit and attitude estimation algorithms can effectively compensate for the effect of low cost hardware and sensor packs utilized in microsatellites. In... 

The subject of low thrust transfer trajectory design to the Sun-Earth L2 Lagrange point, considering the Moon’s gravitational attraction as the fourth body effect has been investigated. In addition, three body resonance orbits chaotic dynamics are also studied. The problem of transfer trajectory design to Earth-Moon halo orbit is investigated using two approaches for the thrusting phase of flight.In the first approach, a complete Bicircular four body model is utilized to initially insert an Earth bound spacecraft via active low thrust propulsion on a stable manifold (SM) of the Earth-Moon three body system. Subsequently, the spacecraft coasts to its desired Halo orbit with minimum Trajectory... 

This thesis is focused on flight dynamics modeling and analysis of an articulated Flapping Micro Air Vehicle (FMAV), where the articulating joint is placed near the wing mid chord span. The articulation modeling, its results and verification due to added degrees of freedom are considered the key motivation and novelties of this project. Initial analyses indicated that a simple articulation device such as joint is not appropriate and will not be efficient for flying FMAV. As a corrective action, a spring-damper mechanism was utilized beside the articulation. Subsequently, the kinematics’ equations are developed and verified using the MSC Automated Dynamic Analysis of Mechanical Systems... 

Uncertainty-based Multidisciplinary Design Optimization (UMDO) is a growing approach in design of complex engineering which has been of great interest to many design bureau and research center especially in field of aerospace. The UMDO goal is to achieve a global optimum design using effective disciplines, interdisciplinary relations and appropriate uncertainty modeling. In this regard, choosing main analysis, design discipline, uncertainty modeling and their content fitness, formulating the problem structure, interaction of disciplines, modeling level of fidelity and the optimization method are the most important challenge of the MDO problem so UMDO is a new trend of MDO, and have been the... 

In this research, an emotion-based intelligent guidance planning for a flapping vehicle is proposed. It utilizes different sciences including artificial intelligence, neural, fuzzy and psychology accompanied by flight dynamics and modeling. The proposed system enables the robot to make emotion, learn and make decision based on its given personality. The decision making is related to the path planning and how moving from the current position to the designed one. In other words, the robot, at each moment, knows what to do and how to do. Therefore, guidance commands of the flying robot are as outputs of the system. In the present research, the control system is assumed ideal. The introduced... 

Using magnetic torquers as the sole actuator for attitude control of small satellite despite its benefits has a drawback that is lack of controllability. Mechanical torques can be created only perpendicular to the instantaneous magnetic field vector, thus at each time instant the satellite can be controlled only around two axes out of its three perpendicular axes.
Fortunately because of the satellite motion, the direction of uncontrollable axis changes by time, therefore the sufficient attitude control can be achieved along time. Almost all of the present magnetic attitude control methods need more than one orbital period to control and cause the attitude to converge to the desired...