Sharif Digital Repository

Evaporation is one of the main parameters of the mass transfer from earth to the atmosphere, which annually transfers more than 65 billion cubic meters of water. Worldwide, evaporation consumes 25% of the energy input and plays a key role in restoring 60% of the precipitation to the atmosphere. Small changes in the water budget and evapotranspiration (ET) in arid and semi-arid areas can cause a large change in ecosystem health. Lake Urmia Basin has been taken into huge consideration due to steepest decline in lake level in the last three decades. Estimating evapotranspiration of this basin is important for the study of agricultural water consumption, hydrological modeling, water resources... 

Urmia Lake is a strong electrolyte containing various salts, with a thermodynamic identity. Changes in the temperature and volume of lake water cause a change in the concentration of ions in this brine as well as the composition and precipitation of salts in the lake. As a result of these changes, the thermodynamic properties of brine are also changed. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of mixing the rivers entering the lake and calculate and analyze the changes in the quality and hydrogeochemical characteristics of Urmia Lake and the amount of precipitation and dissolution of the main minerals in Urmia Lake during the period of 2007-2013 per month. For this purpose,... 

Lake Urmia in northwest Iran is an important water body at the national and international level and plays a significant role in the natural, social, and economic aspects of life in the region. Unfortunately, as a result of natural and anthropologic factors, the lake has suffered a severe water decline in recent decades and was even on the verge of complete drying. Being aware of the catastrophic consequences of lake Urmia's desiccation, a megaproject called Urmia Lake Restoration Program (ULRP) aiming to revive the lake was launched in 2013. Failure in megaprojects is common and frequent in which a high level of uncertainty is one of the main contributing factors. The purpose of this study... 

Polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF) is remarkable since its mechanical properties, chemical stability and significant ferroelectricity. This Polymer has a simple chemical structure and can be found in five different crystal phases (α,β ,ɣ,δ and ε). Between these phases, beta shows a substantial pyro and piezoelectric activity since its great dipole moment. In this study PVDF/Poly(vinyl acetate)/Nanodiamond (ND) nanocomposite films were synthetized by solving in dimethylformamide adding ND particles to PVDF/PVAc blend in order to improve mechanical and piezoelectric properties. Scanning electron microscopy results showed that PVDF/PVAc are miscible and lead to a single crystal phase and dispersion... 

OBS Bracing System is a kind of concentric bracing frame that consists of three members and with y-shape layout can provide a necessary opening in the building. In this investigation will evalouate OBS Bracing System with Knee element. Buildings equipped with OBS-Knee bracing system considered SCBF. To design these buildings according to regulations, it is needed to have Seismic performance coefficients such as response modification factor (R), over strength factor (Ω0) and deflection amplification factor (Cd). The purpose of the present investigation is quantifying these parameters and evaluation of accuracy based on the proposed method in FEMA P695. In the mentioned method, at first by... 

Structures having buckling restrained braces (BRB) as earthquake resisting system, have the qualities of high lateral stiffness and the ability to damp the energy coming from earthquake, at the same time.In addition to new structures, these braces can also be used in rehabilitating old steel or concrete buildings. By using this kind of resisting system, smaller sections are needed in design of buildings and also the cost of repair after earthquake can be highly reduced.The most important advantage of buckling restrained braces is their equal behavior and capacity in both tention and compression, that causes high energy absorption as a result of symmetric and stable cyclic behavior. All these... 

One of the advantages of Steel Plate Shear Walls (SPSWs) is the possibility of using openings with varying sizes in the infill plates depending on a need basis. Openings are used for various reasons, such as the possibility of installing utilities and for architectural reasons. However, the latest research studies suggest that the use of large-sized openings in infill plates calls for the use of heavy stiffeners or special measures for ensuring system stability. The seismic behavior of two SPSWs with large unstiffened opening (one with a rectangular opening in the middle of the plate and the other with two oval openings on the sides of the infill plate) was studied experimentally and... 

Successful treatment of bone infections is a major orthopedic challenge due to the physiological and anatomical features of bone. In this project, we prepared a drug delivery system with injectable and biodegradable polysaccharide agar containing alginate, polyvinyl alcohol and hydroxyapatite nanocarriers composite microspheres. Alginate and polyvinyl alcohol composite microspheres are crosslinked by calcium and freeze-thawing technique. Using the freeze thawing process for polyvinyl alcohol crosslinking, in addition to alginate crosslinking, improved hydrogel swelling behavior and enhanced drug loading and thus slowed drug release, drug loading increased with increasing PVA percentage from ... 

OBS1 frame is a concentric bracing system that consists of three elements, and it provides openings for building using a y-form structure. In the present thesis, the OBS system has been accompanied by a smart damping system.The buildings in which this lateral bearing system is employed are considered as SCBF frames. According to design guidelines, seismic performance parameters are required to design these buildings, including response modification coefficient (R), over-strength factor (Ω) and displacement amplification factor (Cd). This thesis aims to quantify these parameters and evaluate their accuracy based on the method proposed by FEMA-P695. In this method, first, the required initial... 

The primary goal of seismic design requirements of building codes is to protect life safety of occupants during severe earthquakes. Thus it is required that collapse probability of designed buildings to be acceptably low. However current design codes are strength based and intrinsically experimental. Thus collapse safety of buildings designed by these codes is not known quantitatively. The history of formation and update of seismic building codes is marked by big earthquakes; often serving as landmarks for the evolution of seismic codes and detecting its deficiencies. As time passes, the design criteria become more and more articulate and ambitious, just as the design objectives evolve from... 

One of the most efficient methods in stiffening tall buildings to withstand lateral loads such as wind loading is to link the shear resisting core to the exterior columns using outrigger trusses. Many tall buildings such as Taipei 101 have benefited from outriggers. In this system, the outriggers force the perimeter frame to take part in resisting the bending moment of the lateral load acting on the structure by developing axial restraining forces in the windward and the leeward columns of the perimeter frame and forming a resisting moment.Most of the present analytical methods have studied the performance of outrigger braced structures neglecting shear deformation of the shear wall core and... 

Determining nonlinear dynamic behavior of structures is always one of the main goals of structure and earthquake engineers. The Modal Incremental Dynamic Analysis (MIDA) is one of the newest methods for analyzing the seismic behavior of structures. Indeed, this method has superseded the exact IDA method which is too complicated and prolix. Although, this method represents approximate results, high accuracy, fastness and low cost procedure made it an efficient and useful technique. Many researchers have used this method and investigated the accuracy of that and achieved proper results. Up to now no one has applied this method on structures which are equipped with dampers. In the procedure of... 

Existing design methods for steel frames has been improved over the last three decades in order to incorporate the behavior of semi-rigid steel connections in furtherance of frame design and since the analysis and design of structures is often done based on the assumption of completely rigid or pinned behavior,therefore, the actual behavior of connections and their modeling can help to understand the actual behavior of structures.Knowledge of the initial rotational stiffness of the connection is important for elastic analysis of structures. Investigations show that structures with semi-rigid connections have many features which are the causes to prefer these kinds of connections to the... 

To investigate the accurate performance of a structure, the knowledge of the way its connections function, is of great importance. Moreover, cognition of the actual behavior of connections which is often semi-rigid can lead to better apprehension of the actual and more accurate behavior of structures, whilst it is often considered to be pinned or fully-rigid.Therefore, in this study a new semi-rigid steel connection of beam to column will be introduced, and its behavior will be investigated using commercial finite element packages along with mathematical approximate modeling methods. One of the features of this connection is that its behavior mainly depends uponfolding of top and bottom... 

Iron is a common impurity in copper minerals. The presence of iron in hydrometallurgical copper PLS causes continuous reactions between Fe(II) and Fe(III) ions. In order to improve energy efficiency and product quality iron removal shall be done. In this study separation of iron from Sarcheshme copper leaching liquor containing 6 g/L Fe, was conducted by solvent extraction using D2EHPA in kerosene. Chloric acid solution was used to strip the loaded iron from organic phase. Results of extraction experiments designed by taguchi method showed 92.49% iron recovery and 2.44% copper extraction under optimum condition. Using same method for stripping experiments, it was found that variation of time... 

Steel plate shear walls (SPSWs) are popular lateral force resisting systems whose practical applications range from high seismic regions to medium and low seismic areas and wind load applications. The factors which make SPSW attractive include its energy dissipation capacity, excellent ductility, constructability, speed of construction compared to concrete shear walls, reduced architectural footprint compared to concrete shear walls, and increased inelastic deformation capacity as compared to braced frames and concrete shear walls.
In this research, characteristics and behavior of un-stiffened perforated SPSWs using non-linear finite elements software has been investigated. In order to... 

Despite all the developments of construction industry, there are some limitations in this important industry. For example, one of the common limitations of buildings is restrictions of architectural designs that often rise due to location of lateral load-resisting systems of buildings and usually rise disagreement between structure and architecture engineers. The lateral load-resisting systems and location of them are very important, therefore, in this study we attempt to investigate the changes of their location in structure’s stories. Due to architectural restrictions, the removal and movement of lateral load-resisting systems have been done only in some stories or from a story to the... 

Steel bracing systems can be used effectively for seismic retrofitting of existing RC buildings as well as for seismic design of new building. Steel bracing system has been used to increase the lateral load resistance of steel structures. In recent years the concept of steel bracing has also been applied to the retrofitting of reinforced concrete frames, especially to improve seismic performance of non-ductile reinforced concrete buildings. The use of steel bracing systems for seismic rehabilitation of RC frames offers some advantages such as (a) minimal added weight to the structure; (b) ease and speed of construction;(c) increased architectural flexibility; in comparison with RC shear... 

In this thesis, the semi-hinged connections such as double-angle connections, which are welded to the beam web and bolted to the column flange, are investigated. In this study it's tried to establish the effect of clearance setback between beam end and column flange and/or web. When the beam rotates, it is desirable to avoid the bottom flange of the beam bearing against the column as this can induce large forces in the connection. The usual way of achieving this is to ensure that the connection extends at least a few millimeters beyond the end of the beam. For this purpose, several connections are designed and considered, based on two different shear capacities for the beam. For each... 

Nowadays, urban storm water management and wastewater reuse are of main concerns of urban managers. Changes in surface specifications such as imperviousness, manning coefficient, pollutant buildup … during catchment transformation of land use from natural to urban can lead to undesirable change in quality and quantity of catchment's outlet runoff that could cause serious damage to receiving bodies. In recent decades, urban designing's approach has been using detention and quality improvement systems in order to manage urban runoff. Urban runoff and its treatment system (BMP: best management practices) and urban lake (as a receiving body) have been modeled in this research. Velenjak stream's...