Sharif Digital Repository

In this research, the possibility of producing asphalt mixtures containing Reclaimed Asphalt Pavement (RAP) that perform well from both fatigue and rutting points of view was studied. For this, seven asphalt mixtures with varying RAP percentage and total binder content were produced. All other variables, including the gradation and binder type, were kept constant. To better control for the production variables, the mixtures were produced in the laboratory. Fatigue and rutting properties of the mixtures were evaluated using the Simplified Viscoelastic Continuum Damage (S-VECD) model and Triaxial Stress Sweep (TSS) test, respectively. Next, FlexPAVETM software was utilized to predict the... 

Asphalt Pavement Alliance (APA) created the Perpetual Pavement Award program in 2001. This program requires that the roadway has at least 35 years of service at the time of award and had experienced no structural failures. In addition, the program limits candidate roadways to those that have not received more than 100 mm of new asphalt nor have been resurfaced at a frequency exceeding 13 years. Minnesota Department of Transportation (MnDOT) currently owns the record for the most award winners and has received an award every year from 2002 through 2017. This study reviews all the award-winning roadways in Minnesota to determine common material, design factors and considerations which may have... 

This work investigates the species separation in the rarefied flow of the argon-helium mixture through convergent-divergent micronozzles. Imposing a molecular mass ratio in the order of 10, the flow of this mixture can lead to the formation of serious nonhomogeneous phenomena such as the species separation. This study is performed in the ranges of 2.0-4.0 for the geometrical expansion ratio, 200-400 K for the wall temperature, and 0.003-1.454 for the inlet Knudsen number. The effects of these parameters are examined on the separative performances of micronozzle. The direct simulation Monte Carlo method is selected as the solution method because it can provide reliable solutions in the... 

The SUT-Crack dataset (Sharif University of Technology Crack Dataset) presents a collection of high-quality images depicting asphalt pavement cracks specifically designed to facilitate crack detection using various deep learning methods, including classification, object detection, segmentation, etc. During the dataset creation process, careful consideration was given to encompass all possible crack detection challenges, such as the presence of oil stains and shadows on the pavement surface along with varying lighting conditions. The dataset comprises 130 images designed specifically for segmentation and object detection tasks. Each image is accompanied by precise ground truth annotations.... 

Pavement distress is a major contributor to overall road quality degradation. Maintaining roadways with the use of a Pavement Management System requires an extensive and up-to-date inventory of the many types of roadway distress. Such inventory for a road network can be labor-intensive and time-consuming to create. This study introduces a novel method, called Hybrid Method, to detect asphalt pavement surface cracks based on 2D images. Hybrid Method consists of two separate techniques, proposed by this study, which are combined to detect cracks. The first is a supervised learning-based technique which requires annotated images. This approach utilizes the Local Binary Pattern (LBP) as a... 

In this paper, the performance of a novel HDH solar desalination system equipped with a combination of heat pipe (HP), evacuated tube collector (ETC) and air bubble column humidifier is experimentally investigated. This novel HDH system uses advantages of ETC-HP as a highly efficient thermal absorption and conductor device, and at the same time employs the advantages of an air bubble column humidifier, i.e. high interface area and effective mixing in order to heat the water and humidify the air, respectively. The effects of various parameters including incoming air flow rate into the humidifier, initial depth of water in the humidifier, and adding fluids such as oil and water in the space... 

Image fusion means to integrate information from one image to another image. Medical images according to the nature of the images are divided into structural (such as CT and MRI) and functional (such as SPECT, PET). This article fused MRI and PET images and the purpose is adding structural information from MRI to functional information of PET images. The images decomposed with Nonsubsampled Contourlet Transform and then two images were fused with applying fusion rules. The coefficients of the low frequency band are combined by a maximal energy rule and coefficients of the high frequency bands are combined by a maximal variance rule. Finally, visual and quantitative criteria were used to... 

Echocardiography as a common place device has been widely used for diagnosis. Segmentation of left ventricle just using the standard level set formulation based on the magnitude of intensity cannot restrict the contour evolution completely due to the lack of sharp edges. This paper aims to introduce a robust method for segmentation of three-dimensional echocardiography images based on two boundary maps namely distance map and probabilistic map as stopping criteria of contour evolution which are extracted using two different approaches. The distance map is extracted by applying Free Form Deformation (FFD) method on manually determined landmarks of initial spherical volume to register the... 

In this paper, an efficient approach for ultrasonic object segmentation with special application for left ventricle segmentation in echocardiography images is proposed. At first, an efficient hybrid trend for ultrasonic image edge detection is suggested. Then, a modified level set approach is introduced based on the extracted edges and the computed probabilistic map as the stopping criteria for the contour evolution. Both synthetic and clinical images are utilized as validation measures with respect to the prior techniques which indicate outperform results quantitatively and qualitatively. Left ventricle segmentation using proposed method illustrates expert-approved performance, providing a... 

The substitution of conventional mathematical models with fast and accurate modeling tools can result in the further development of desalination technologies and tackling the need for freshwater. Due to the great capability of data-driven methods in analyzing complex systems, several attempts have been made to study various desalination systems using data-driven approaches. In this state-of-the-art review, the application of various artificial intelligence and design of experiment data-driven methods for analyzing different desalination technologies have been thoroughly investigated. According to the applications of data-driven methods in the field of desalination, the reviewed... 

In this research, Linear Amplitude Sweep (LAS) test was conducted on several asphalt binders modified by different percentages of gilsonite and Styrene-Butadiene-Styrene (SBS) polymer. Asphalt mixtures were also made from some of the study binders and tested for fatigue resistance using Four-point Bending Beam (FBB) fatigue test. The results showed that a strong correlation exists between LAS and FBB rankings at all the tested strain levels. Also, SHRP binder fatigue index (G∗sinδ), as a traditional binder fatigue index, was evaluated which did not show a strong correlation with either LAS or FBB tests. It was concluded that LAS test seems to be an effective binder fatigue test in predicting...