Sharif Digital Repository

Understanding many issues related to environmental geotechnics and soil sciences such as: instability and collapse of soil slopes, sinkholes, leakage from landfills and isolation of nuclear landfills, and optimization Agricultural processing depends on our knowledge of the behavior of unsaturated soils and their volume changes. To better understand the behavior of unsaturated soils, it is important to study the soil-water retention curve (SWRC) and the factors affecting it. These include factors such as porosity, grain size distribution, soil minerals, pore size distribution, and pore water chemistry, which affect soil-water retention curves and volume changes. Since the simultaneous effect... 

Power transmission lines, which are responsible for the distribution and transmission of electrical energy from the power plant to the consumer areas, due to their characteristics such as long length and flexibility with low structural damping, face environmental irritations, especially the galloping phenomenon, causing many damages annually. In this study, it has been attempted to reduce the vibrations of power transmission lines by designing a robust active control and by using intermediate actuators in such a way that the failures of these lines can be prevented. For this purpose, linear modeling of the system and designing the controller using the pole replacement method have been done.... 

Soil and water pollution is one of the most common types of pollution in terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems. The development of mines and the oil and petrochemical industry on one hand and the non-compliance with environmental requirements on the other hand have caused large amounts of hydrocarbon pollutants and heavy metals to enter the environment in recent decades. Petroleum materials and heavy metals leak into the surrounding environment during drilling and extraction in oil sites and mines or during land and sea transportation, despite the measures taken to control their pollution. The conducted studies show that human industrial activities are the only cause of environmental pollution... 

The power control of horizontal axis wind turbines can affect significantly the vibration loads and fatigue life of the tower and the blades. In this thesis, we are going to consider both the power control and vibration load mitigation of the tower fore-aft vibration. For this purpose, at first, we developed a fully coupled model of the NREL 5MW turbine. This model considers the full aeroelastic behavior of the blades and tower and is validated by experiment results, comparing the time history data with the FAST (Fatigue, Aerodynamics, Structures, and Turbulence ) code which is developed by NREL (National Renewable Energy Lab in the United States). In the next, to estimate EWV, a novel... 

Nowadays electricity power has a key role in developing various aspects of the world. The great importance of fossil fuel power plants come from their large contribution in electricity power generation. Among the different fossil fuel power generation technologies, supercritical power plants have great advantages. They are an advanced power generation technology with high plant efficiency, high coal utilization and low emission. Their complexity and existing many unavoidable uncertainty sources in their dynamic such as changes of ambient temperature, climate condition and wear of components make their control challenging. To overcome mentioned problems and achieving a good performance, a... 

Estimation of indirect economic losses due to natural disasters, especially earthquakes, is one of the essential issues in disaster management. This study presents a framework that uses an economic model of the community under study and calculates the indirect economic losses caused by an earthquake. To this end, first, the earthquake-induced direct economic losses are quantified using appropriate risk analysis models. The direct losses are used to characterize the consequent shock to labor and capital. These shocks are then used as inputs to the regional economic model. In the proposed framework, a Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) model uses various data about the state of the community... 

Various contaminants and their leachate, when they penetrate into the soil, cause changes in soil microstructure, this change in microstructure leads to changes in soil permeability and volume. In this study, first, the effects of soil microstructure change on the hydraulic conductivity of saturated soil were investigated using the change in initial saturation degree during compaction for compacted samples and the change in sample construction in reconstituted samples. Also, the simultaneous effect of changing the initial microstructure and salt solution on the hydraulic conductivity of saturated silty clay soils using a three-axial permeability device with the ability to measure volume... 

Natural disasters can damage the infrastructure of society. Damages to the infrastructure components of society can disrupt their service delivery. Disruption in providing services to society's infrastructure can disrupt social and economic activities and impose various significant costs on society. The cost of repairing the damaged infrastructure and reducing the income of households are among the economic damages of accidents. The decline in the quality of life, as well as the death and injury of people due to the breakdown of the infrastructure or the disruption in their services, are among the social damages caused by accidents. In the same way, natural disasters are considered a... 

Due to the vulnerability of urban fabric and residential buildings to earthquakes and considering its destructive social and economic effects on society, the need to adopt appropriate policies to prevent and reduce vulnerability, has been increasingly considered by policy makers. Despite the laws, regulations, incentives and penalties that policymakers have envisioned to prevent unprincipled and unsafe construction, evidence shows that a significant number of new buildings being built in the country are not earthquake resistant and there are many violations in design, implementation and supervision that is done by the stakeholders. To solve this problem, research has been done on the... 

One of the most important processes in the manufacture of mechanical parts in the industry is the machining process. High-speed milling is growing in aerospace, automotive, and many other industries due to advantages such as high material removal rates and better surface finish. However, the instability caused by self-excited vibration (chatter) is not only one of the main limitations for the productivity and quality of the workpiece but also reduces the life of machines and tools. In this research, after introducing the matter of milling flexible parts, the basic concepts of machining are first described, and common terms in machining are explained. Then, a review of past research has been... 

Vegetation can be used as a research solution at the cutting edge of knowledge, cost-effective, aesthetic, pleasing, and environmentally friendly in natural hazards. Understanding the hydraulic properties, including the permeability of vegetated soils, is very important for various environmental applications. Different and sometimes conflicting behaviors have been observed in literature. There has been no general consensus in the literature regarding permeability due to the influence of several factors. In addition, there are many uncertainties about the effect of plant cultivation and root system effects on anisotropic soil permeability. It is essential to address this issue because of the... 

The instability and contamination leakage through tailings dams is one of the major problems of them. These dams are usually constructed through self-consolidation with minimum compaction effort, so special attention must be given to the stability of these structures. In addition, tailings dams contain considerable amounts of metals and chemically soluble contaminants resulting from mining processes in their reservoirs, making them more likely to leak contamination from the dam's foundation and body, causing pollution downstream. The infiltration of various chemical contaminants into the soil may alter its hydraulic and resistance properties. Laboratory studies have shown that pore solution... 

The increase in the amount of groundwater exploitation and climate changes has made land subsidence into one of the environmental problems and has caused many problems in various infrastructures such as urban areas, residential buildings, and vital arteries such as power transmission lines. Many areas of the country, especially areas with smooth topography such as plains where alluvium accumulates, due to excessive exploitation of groundwater resources and climate changes, are facing a decrease in the level of groundwater, an increase in the thickness of the unsaturated layer, and as a result, progressive subsidence. In particular, the destructive effects of land subsidence on power... 

The purpose of this project is to model a rotating beam with variable properties of the cross section and also to present an active control method for suppressing the undesired vibrations due to external loading. The beam is modeled as a cantilever Euler-Bernoulli beam with nonuniform physical and geometrical properties. For a practical example, the characteristics of a wind turbine blade was used to solve the problem. The analyzed blade in this study is NREL 5-MW wind turbine blade. But the method can be extended to be used for other blades as well . First the natural frequencies and modeshapes were computed by MATLAB. Then by applying pole placement method, a control strategy was designed... 

In the aftermath of earthquakes, hospitals serve the critical role of treating casualties and reducing mortalities and severe injuries. A hospital must be resilient to play its role correctly after the earthquake. A resilient hospital is able to maintain its functionality at an acceptable level and provide service to the injured. In order to enhance the resilience of a hospital, an appropriate framework is needed to evaluate the hospital resilience and determines the impact of modification actions. This framework should characterize the serviceability of a hospital in terms of an appropriate metric. In this framework, the behavior of a given hospital building in the event of an earthquake as...