Sharif Digital Repository

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Archaeological excavations in western Iran have recently revealed a significant Luristan Bronzes collection from Sangtarashan archaeological site. The site and its bronze collection are dated to Iron Age II/III of western Iran (10th-7th century BC) according to archaeological research. Alloy composition, microstructure and manufacturing technique of some sheet metal vessels are determined to reveal metallurgical processes in western Iran in the first millennium BC. Experimental analyses were carried out using Scanning Electron Microscopy-Energy Dispersive X-ray Spectroscopy and Optical Microscopy/Metallography methods. The results allowed reconstructing the manufacturing process of bronze... 

Securing communication against non-colluding passive eavesdroppers has been extensively studied. Colluding eavesdroppers were considered for interference-limited large networks. However, collusion was not investigated for large cooperative networks. This paper closes this gap: we study the improvement the eavesdroppers achieve due to collusion in terms of the information leakage rate in a large cooperative network. We consider a dense network with nl legitimate nodes, ne eavesdroppers, and path loss exponent α ≥ 2. We show that if ne (2+2/α) (log ne)γ = o(n l) holds, for some positive γ, then zero-cost secure communication is possible; i.e., ne colluding eavesdroppers can be tolerated. This... 

There are many parameters utilized to obtain a more reasonable performance for structures under earthquake excitations in seismic provisions. General considered parameters in seismic provisions are: PGA, importance factor (I) and typical inherent overstrength and global ductility capacity (R). It is well recognized that the main characteristic of the design of structures under seismic excitation is probabilistic rather than deterministic; therefore, it should be determined if whether the probability of structural damage decreases when such parameters change in the design of structures. In this paper, fragility curves are developed in order to evaluate these parameters. Fragility curves are... 

The effect of mould preheating temperature, casting modulus and graphite addition method on surface decarburisation during lost wax casting of CK 45 steel has been investigated. For this purpose, a novel image analysis program was developed to determine the carbon concentration profile. It was observed that on increasing the preheating temperature and casting modulus, the depth of decarburisation increases significantly. This behaviour was related to the decreased cooling rate of the samples which enhances the loss of carbon by reaction with the surrounding atmosphere. It was also found that the distribution of graphite in different layers of the mould and the distance of these layers from... 

In this study, effects of replacing cement with colloidal amorphous silica nano-particles have been experimentally investigated on the physical and mechanical properties, durability and microstructure of concrete. Experimental results include workability, fresh concrete density, and hardened concrete properties like compressive strength at different ages of 3, 7, and 28-days, and also 28-days splitting tensile strength. Furthermore, influence of silica nano-particles on durability and microstructure of concrete for 28-days specimens was tested by conducting water absorption test, Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM), and Energy Dispersive X-ray Analysis (EDAX), respectively. In order to study... 

Nowadays use of a new structural bracing system called 'Knee Bracing System' have taken the specialists attention too much. On the other hand nonlinear static analysis procedures in estimate structures performance in earthquake time have taken attention too much. One of these procedure is modal pushover analysis (MPA) procedure. The accuracy of MPA procedure for simple steel moment resisting frame has been verified and considered in Chintanapakdee and Chopra's article in 2003. Since the accuracy of MPA procedure has not verified for semi-rigid steel frames with knee bracing, we are going to get through with this matter in this study. For this purpose, the selected structures are four frames... 

In this paper we develop a hybrid forecasting model which combines artificial intelligence and technical analysis to predict short-term stock price index. The results show that using technical indices as neural network's inputs yields good performance in forecasting short-term prices, but this model cannot predict long-term prices well. To overcome this shortcoming we have exploited a fuzzy inference system based on analyzing the historical effects of macro economic variables on the stock markets' indices. Our forecasting models differ from the other ones in two main aspects: the first one is analyzing previous macroeconomics trends in order to build a Mamdani FIS and the second one is... 

The present paper reports the spectroscopic investigations on the complexation of Cu(II) with two macrocyclic ligands bonded to [60]Fullerene (L1 and L2) measured in N-methylpyrrolidone (NMP) as solvent. On the basis of UV–vis-NIR spectroscopy applying Jobs method of continuous variation, typical 1:1 stoichiometries were established for the complexes of Cu(II) with L1, and L2. DFT calculations suggested that superior HOMO distributions spread over the nitrogen-donor (as well as somehow oxygen- donor in L2) groups of L1 and L2 macrocycles were the key factor for the observed Kb value enhancement. Thermodynamic stabilities for these complexes have also been determined employing... 

Mobile value-added services have drawn the attention of researchers and practitioners recently, due to the rapid development of the mobile telecommunications market. Various mobile-based services and applications have therefore been introduced in order to satisfy mobile phone subscribers' needs. Facing intensive competition, service providers are eager to persuade mobile phone subscribers into using the mobile value-add services in the hope to expand market share and ultimately raise revenues. This study therefore intends to investigate the factors that influence mobile phone subscribers' intention to use mobile value-added services in Iran by incorporating quality factors and perceived... 

In this work, an optimum multilayer perceptron neural network is developed to model the correlation between hot working parameters (temperature, strain rate and strain) and flow stress of IN625 alloy. Three variations of standard back propagation algorithm (Broyden, Fletcher, Goldfarb and Shanno quasi-Newton, Levenberg-Marquardt and Bayesian) are applied to train the model. The results show that, in this case, the best performance, minimum error and shortest converging time are achieved by the Levenberg-Marquardt training algorithm. Comparing the predicted values and the experimental values reveals that a well trained network is capable of accurately calculating the flow stress of the alloy... 

Due to the large volume required for medical images for transmission and archiving purposes, the compression of medical images is known as one of the main concepts of medical image processing. Lossless compression methods have the drawback of a low compression ratio. In contrast, lossy methods have a higher compression ratio and suffer from lower quality of the reconstructed images in the receiver. Recently, some selective compression methods have been proposed in which the main image is divided into two separate regions: Region of Interest (ROI), which should be compressed in a lossless manner, and Region of Background (ROB), which is compressed in a lossy manner with a lower quality. In... 

A comparative investigation of the interaction of Cu(II) with a series of 15- to 19-membered mixed-donor dibenzo-substituted macrocyclic ligands, each incorporating an O2N2-donor set, has been carried out using UV-Visible studies in methanol. Although a ring size effect has been reported for a related series of Ni(II) complexes, no such metal ion discrimination has been reported for Cu(II) in terms of its binding constants with 14- to 17-membered macrocycles. Employing Job's method of continuous variation established 1:1 stoichiometry for the interaction between Cu(II) and 1-5. From UV-Visible studies applying the Benesi-Hildebrand equation, the binding constants (K) of Cu(II) with 1-5 were... 

This Paper presents simulation of Electroosmotic phenomenon in a capillary using an extended hybrid finite-volume-element method. Most of the last electroosmotic phenomenon studies in microchannels do not take into consideration the effect of reservoirs and pressure drops occurred at the inlet and outlet of the microchannel. This neglect may lead to a few drawbacks. For example, the incorrect pressure drops can significantly alter the flow patterns and mass flow rates in microchannels. As a remedy the use of reservoirs at the two ends of a microchannel has been recently practiced as a novel strategy to overcome this drawback. However, this remedy needs careful attention because the resulting... 

The optimal design of a casting feeding system is considered. The riser topology is systematically modified to minimize the riser volume, while simultaneously ensuring that no defect appears in the product. In this approach, we combine finite-difference analysis of the solidification process with evolutionary topology optimization to systematically improve the feeding system design. The outstanding features of the presented method are: its efficiency, ease of implementation and simplifying definition of the initial design. The efficiency and capability of the presented method are supported by illustrative examples. © 2008 Springer-Verlag  

In this note, we study the behavior of independent sets of maximum probability measure in tensor graph powers. To do this, we introduce an upper bound using measure preserving homomorphisms. This work extends some previous results concerning independence ratios of tensor graph powers. © 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved  

The optimal feeder design in gravity casting processes is considered. The design problem is formulated as an additive, growth-like, evolutionary topology optimization problem. The initial design of the presented method is a casting part which is placed in a suitable environmental mould box. The method is composed of three stages: determining the feeder-neck connection point on the casting surface, constructing the feeder-neck and the feeder growth. During the growth stage, the feeder topology is changed gradually until satisfying some predefined criteria. The design of multiple feeders is also considered in this work. In the presented method, feeders are designed in a descending order of... 

Pulse laser ablation (PLA) technique has been demonstrated to be a simple, compatible, promising, versatile, relatively low-cost, pure, and green approach with the absence of toxic chemicals and reagents for fabrication of metal nanoparticles. Purity is an especially important attribute of metal nanoparticles (NPs) in biological and medical technologies. For such applications, it is crucial to prepare metal NPs with the desired shape and size distribution. This chapter discusses the advantages of the PLA technique as compared with other techniques for metal NPs, explains the various mechanisms involved in the generation of metal NPs, outlines the effects of laser parameters, such as... 

This paper studies mixed-mode shear band propagation behaviors in porous plastic dilatant materials by the extended finite element method (XFEM). The Drucker-Prager elastoplastic model is combined with the strong discontinuity method to simulate the dilatant shear band. First, the dissipative nature of the localized area with displacement jump is integrated into the constitutive model by introducing a cohesive law. A new contribution lies that the yielding function is modified in the localized region to calculate the cohesive traction within the framework of the XFEM. The shear band propagation direction is determined by the singularity of the acoustic tensor and the corresponding... 

We consider an American contingent claim on a financial market where the buyer has additional information. Both agents (seller and buyer) observe the same prices, while the information available to them may differ due to some extra exogenous knowledge the buyer has. The buyer's information flow is modeled by an initial enlargement of the reference filtration. It seems natural to investigate the value of the American contingent claim with asymmetric information. We provide a representation for the cost of the additional information relying on some results on reflected backward stochastic differential equations (RBSDE). This is done by using an interpretation of prices of American contingent...