Sharif Digital Repository

The response of infinite beams supported by nonlinear viscoelastic foundations subjected to harmonic moving loads is studied. A straightforward solution technique applicable in the frequency domain is presented in this paper. The governing equations are solved using a perturbation method in conjunction with complex Fourier transformation. A closed-formed solution is presented in an integral form based on the presented Green's function and the theorem of residues is used for the calculation of integrals. The solution is directed to compute the deflection and bending moment distribution along the length of the beam. A parametric study is carried out and influences of the load speed and... 

The ride comfort of high-speed trains passing over railway bridges is studied in this paper. The effects of some nonlinear parameters in a carriage-track-bridge system are investigated such as the load-stiffening characteristics of the rail-pad and the ballast, rubber elements in the primary and secondary suspension systems. The influence of the track irregularity and train speed on two comfort indicators, namely Sperling's comfort index and the maximum acceleration level, are also studied. Timoshenko beam theory is used for modelling the rail and bridge and two layers of parallel damped springs in conjunction with a layer of mass are used to model the rail-pads, sleepers and ballast. A... 

On July 24th, 2010, several explosions and fires devastated a hydrocarbon processing plant in Kharg Island, Iran. Four workers were killed and many others were severely injured. The plant became out of service for 80 days. The way the accident happened and its sequence was representing as a domino accident. In this paper, events leading up to the disaster have been analyzed in details. Graphic presentation techniques such as Fish Bone Analysis and Event Sequence Diagram (ESD) have been utilized to enhance the understanding of the accident mechanism. Finally major lessons learnt from this domino accident have been addressed  

The ride comfort of high-speed trains passing over railway bridges is studied in this paper. A parametric study is carried out using a time domain model. The effects of some design parameters are investigated such as damping and stiffness of the suspension system and also ballast stiffness. The influence of the track irregularity and train speed on two comfort indicators, namely Sperling's comfort index and the maximum acceleration level are also studied. Two types of railway bridges, a simple girder and an elastically supported bridge are considered. Timoshenko beam theory is used for modelling the rail and bridge and two layers of parallel damped springs in conjunction with a layer of mass... 

We have studied the simplest optomechanical system close to and in the bistable regime. We find that Optomechanical entanglement is particularly strong in this regime for large enough detuning. The robustness of entanglement against temperature is also studied  

The vibration response of a Timoshenko beam supported by a viscoelastic foundation with randomly distributed parameters along the beam length and jected to a harmonic moving load, is studied. By means of the first-order two-dimensional regular perturbation method and employing appropriate Green's functions, the dynamic response of the beam consisting of the mean and variance of the deflection and of the bending moment are obtained analytically in integral forms. Results of a field measurement for a test track are utilized to model the uncertainty of the foundation parameters. A frequency analysis is carried out and the effect of the load speed on the response is studied. It is found that the... 

The fresh groundwater lenses (FGLs) of small islands can be highly vulnerable to climate change impacts, including sea-level rise (SLR). Many real cases of atoll or sandy islands involve two-layer hydrogeological conceptualizations. In this paper, the influential factors that affect FGLs in two-layer small islands subject to SLR are investigated. An analytical solution describing FGLs in circular islands, composed of two geological layers, is developed for the simplified case of steady-state and sharp-interface conditions. An application of the developed model is demonstrated to estimate the FGL thickness of some real-world islands by comparison with existing FGL thickness data. Furthermore,... 

Hybrid deep neural network hidden Markov models (DNN-HMM) have achieved impressive results on large vocabulary continuous speech recognition (LVCSR) tasks. However, the recent approaches using DNN-HMM models are not explored much for text recognition. Inspired by the current work in automatic speech recognition (ASR) and machine translation, we present an open vocabulary sub-word text recognition system. The sub-word lexicon and sub-word language model (LM) helps in overcoming the challenge of recognizing out of vocabulary (OOV) words, and a time delay neural network (TDNN) and convolution neural network (CNN) based DNN-HMM optical model (OM) efficiently models the sequence dependency in the... 

Support vector machines (SVMs) were used as a novel learning machine in the authentication of the origin of salmon. SVMs have the advantage of relying on a well-developed theory and have already proved to be successful in a number of practical applications. This paper provides a new and effective method for the discrimination between wild and farm salmon and eliminates the possibility of fraud through misrepresentation of the country of origin of salmon. The method requires a very simple sample preparation of the fish oils extracted from the white muscle of salmon samples. 1H NMR spectroscopic analysis provides data that is very informative for analysing the fatty acid constituents of the... 

An index for characterizing wettability of reservoir rocks is presented using slope analysis of spontaneous imbibition recovery data. The slope analysis is performed using the known exact analytical solution to infinite acting period of counter-current spontaneous imbibition. The proposed theoretically based wettability index offers some advantages over existing methods: (1) it is a better measure of the spontaneous imbibition potential of rock (because the magnitude is directly proportional to the imbibition rate); (2) there is no need for forced displacement data; (3) there is no need for waiting until the spontaneous imbibition process ceases completely; and (4) the data needed to run the... 

Spontaneous imbibition of water into the matrix blocks because of capillary forces is an important recovery mechanism for oil recovery from naturally fractured reservoirs. In modeling this process, it has been assumed classically that local equilibrium is reached and, therefore, capillary pressure and relative permeability functions are only a function of water saturation, resulting in the appearance of the self-similarity condition. In some works published in the last 2 decades, it has, however, been claimed that local equilibrium is not reached in porous media, and therefore, opposite the classical local-equilibrium/self-similar approach, non-equilibrium effects should be taken into... 

An index for characterizing wettability of reservoir rocks is presented using slope analysis of spontaneous imbibition recovery data. The slope analysis is performed using the known exact analytical solution to infinite acting period of counter-current spontaneous imbibition. The proposed theoretically based wettability index offers some advantages over existing methods: (1) it is a better measure of the spontaneous imbibition potential of rock (because the magnitude is directly proportional to the imbibition rate); (2) there is no need for forced displacement data; (3) there is no need for waiting until the spontaneous imbibition process ceases completely; and (4) the data needed to run the... 

Including gravity and wettability effects, a full analytical solution for the frontal flow period for 1D counter-current spontaneous imbibition of a wetting phase into a porous medium saturated initially with non-wetting phase at initial wetting phase saturation is presented. The analytical solution applicable for liquid-liquid and liquid-gas systems is essentially valid for the cases when the gravity forces are relatively large and before the wetting phase front hits the no-flow boundary in the capillary-dominated regime. The new analytical solution free of any arbitrary parameters can also be utilized for predicting non-wetting phase recovery by spontaneous imbibition. In addition, a new... 

Spontaneous imbibition of water into the matrix blocks because of capillary forces is an important recovery mechanism for oil recovery from naturally fractured reservoirs. In modeling this process, it has been assumed classically that local equilibrium is reached and, therefore, capillary pressure and relative permeability functions are only a function of water saturation, resulting in the appearance of the self-similarity condition. In some works published in the last 2 decades, it has, however, been claimed that local equilibrium is not reached in porous media, and therefore, opposite the classical local-equilibrium/self-similar approach, non-equilibrium effects should be taken into... 

Oil production strategies define to a large extent the future of the world crude oil market. This paper aims at modelling the long-term world crude oil supply and demand, as well as the global oil price. The main assumption is that non-OPEC and OPEC oil producers act as price-taker and strategic players respectively. The world crude oil demand is modelled as a linear price dependent function. We compare four scenarios to diagnose the OPEC’s supply behaviour: “cartel”, “oligopoly”, “mixed-cartel” and “mixed-oligopoly”. A Mixed Complementarity Problem, MCP, is used to find the Nash equilibrium point of each game scenario. The OPEC countries maximize their individual total discounted profits in... 

The effect of operation variables, such as the H2/CO molar feed ratio, gas hourly space velocity (GHSV), temperature, and pressure, on the catalytic performance of the Co/Mn/TiO2 catalyst prepared at the Research Institute of the Petroleum Industry (RIPI) was investigated, and optimum reactor conditions were obtained to produce the maximum amount of light olefins. The catalyst was prepared by co-precipitation of Co and Mn phases in the presence of commercial TiO2 with maximum selectivity for ethylene and propylene production. It was found that the [H2]/[CO]=2/1, space velocity (GHSV) of 1800 h-1, 280°C temperature and 4 bar pressure were optimum operating conditions for the modified catalyst... 

The solubility of carbon dioxide and hydrogen sulfide gases in the ionic liquid 1-ethyl-3-methylimidazolium trifluoromethanesulfonate ([C2mim][OTf]) was measured at temperatures from (303.15-353.15) K and pressures up to about 3.0 MPa. The Henry's law constants were determined from the new experimental data, which in turn were used to derive the change of some thermodynamic functions of dissolution of the gases in that particular ionic liquid. The new experimental data were correlated by a combination of the extended Henry's law and Pitzer's model for the excess Gibbs energy. The average relative percent deviation (ARD%) of correlated molality values from experimental data are within... 

The problem of joint estimation of the state and input in linear time-invariant dynamical systems is revisited proposing novel sequential Bayesian formulations. An appealing feature of the proposed method is the promise it delivers for updating the covariance matrices of the process and measurement noise in a real-time fashion using asymptotic approximations. The proposed method avoids the direct transmission of the input into predictions of the state using a zero-mean Gaussian distribution for the input. This prior distribution aims to eliminate low-frequency drifts from estimations of the state and input. Moreover, the method is outlined in a computational algorithm offering real-time...