Sharif Digital Repository

Public Bicycle Sharing System has recently been developed and installed in many cities as a workable and popular transportation system. There are still some noticeable challenges associated with the operation of the system, like responding to all renting requests and all demands of vacant docks for returning bikes. Balancing the inventory of stations is necessary to minimize the rejected demands of bikes and the empty lockers. Here, critical levels are defined to control requests of different routes in which a demand of a specified destination is accepted if the inventory of the original station is higher than the route's critical level. The capacity of stations and the fleet size are... 

Wastewater of purified terephthalic acid (PTA) from a petrochemical plant was examined in a membrane-less single chamber microbial fuel cell for the first time. Time course of voltage during the cell operation cycle had two steady phases, which refers to the fact that metabolism of microorganisms was shifted from highly to less biodegradable carbon sources. The produced power density was 31.8 mW m-2 (normalized per cathode area) and the calculated coulombic efficiency was 2.05 % for a COD removal of 74 % during 21 days. The total removal rate of different pollutants in the PTA wastewater was observed in the following order: (acetic acid) > (benzoic acid) > (phthalic acid) > (terephthalic... 

CO2 gas injection is known as one of the most popular enhanced oil recovery techniques for light and medium oil reservoirs, therefore providing an acceptable mass transfer mechanism for CO2–oil systems seems necessary. In this study, interfacial mass transfer coefficient has been evaluated for CO2–normal heptane and CO2–normal hexadecane systems using equilibrium and dynamic interfacial tension data, which have been measured using the pendant drop method. Interface mass transfer coefficient has been calculated as a function of temperature and pressure in the range of 313–393 K and 1.7–8.6 MPa, respectively. The results showed that the interfacial resistance is a parameter that can control... 

A new mixed-integer nonlinear programming model is presented for the time-dependent vehicle routing problem with time windows and intelligent travel times. The aim is to minimize fixed and variable costs, with the assumption that the travel time between any two nodes depends on traffic conditions and is considered to be a function of vehicle departure time. Depending on working hours, the route between any two nodes has a unique traffic parameter. We consider each working day to be divided into several equal and large intervals, termed as a time interval of traffic. Here, allowing for long distances between some of the nodes, travel time may take more than one time interval of traffic,... 

In this study, high-vanadium austenitic manganese steel (HV-AMS) alloys and the standard Hadfield steel were investigated. The microstructure of these high-vanadium alloyed Hadfield steels was studied thoroughly using optical microscopy (OM), scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and X-ray diffraction (XRD) and was compared to the Hadfield steel. The hardness and unnotched Charpy impact strength of HV-AMS alloys and Hadfield steel were examined at ambient temperature in the as-cast and heat-treated conditions. A pin-on-disk wear test at linear speed of 10. m/min and a 55. N normal load was employed to evaluate the wear behavior of both steel samples. Microstructural results showed that varying... 

Endurance Time (ET) method is a response history based analysis procedure that can be used for estimating the seismic response of structures at different excitation levels in each response history. This seismic analysis method utilizes specific intensifying acceleration functions to analyze seismic behaviors. One of the potential applications of the ET method is in the seismic assessment of shell structures. In this study, a procedure for linear seismic analysis of shell structures is proposed and applications of this method is investigated for several cases of shell structures. These structures are analyzed under three ET acceleration functions in one direction and the results are compared... 

For natural numbers n and k (n > 2k), a generalized Petersen graph P(n, k), is defined by vertex set {ui ui] and edge set {ui ui+1, ui ui, ui ui+k}; where i = 1, 2,..., n and subscripts are reduced modulo n. Here first, we characterize minimum vertex covers in generalized Petersen graphs. Second, we present a lower bound and some upper bounds for β(P(n, k)), the size of minimum vertex cover of P(n,k). Third, in some cases, we determine the exact values of β(P(n,k)). Our conjecture is that β(P(n, k)) < n+ [n/5], for all n and k  

Ceramic suspensions were prepared from an alumino-silicate powder, polyethylene wax (PE-wax) as binder with additions of stearic acid (SA). The ceramic powder consisted of mullite, corundum and tridymite phases. The organic binders contained 3 to 8 wt.% ethylene-vinyl acetate (EVA) and were filled with various volume fractions of ceramic powder. The yield stresses of suspensions were estimated using shear stress-shear rate data measured at 90-120 °C. The addition level of EVA was shown to have a considerable effect on the yield stress of suspensions. The effect of EVA on the flow parameters was also investigated over the temperature range of 90 to 120 °C. It was shown that the addition of 5... 

An investigation into the dynamics of vehicle-passenger-structure-induced vibration of suspension bridges traversed by accelerating vehicles is carried out. The vehicle including the driver and passengers is modeled as a half-car planer model with six degrees-of-freedom. In addition, the stiffness of compliant bushings at the connecting points of the shock absorbers to the body is considered. The bridge is assumed to obey the Timoshenko beam theory with axial load and arbitrary conventional boundary conditions. The roughness of the bridge is assumed as a differentiable function of location. Due to continuously moving the location of the variable loads on the bridge, and in the presence of... 

Both theoretical and experimental analysis of acoustics fields effects on droplet vaporization are presented. Theoretical investigation is based on droplet vaporization without combustion in both steady and longitudinal acoustic fields with variable properties in one dimension. An axisymmetric pulse combustor is developed for simulating the longitudinal acoustic field. A spray system is used for producing water droplets. Controllable parameters of the system are the hot air and liquid injection velocities, direction of injection and frequency of acoustic oscillation. The theoretical results indicate that the evaporation time decreases up to 30 percent in an acoustic field in comparison to... 

We fabricated a high rate capability supercapacitor based on fluorine-doped graphene-carbon nanotubes aerogel network (G-CNT-F). Based on the electrochemical impedance spectroscopy data, the fluorination decreases the charge transfer resistance of graphene sheets, while CNTs act as spacer in the 3D structure. Therefore, both treatments improved the electrochemical properties of the resulted aerogel. Based on the Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy and XPS results, these excellent performances are attributed to semi-ionic bonds between fluorine and carbon. The specific capacitance of the graphene aerogel showed 78% decrease, when discharge current increases from 2 to 40 mA, while the... 

In order to regenerate bone defects, bioactive hierarchically scaffolds play a key role due to their multilevel porous structure, high surface area, enhanced nutrient transport and diffusion. In this study, novel hierarchically porous silk fibroin (SF) and silk fibroin-bioactive glass (SF-BG) composite were fabricated with controlled architecture and interconnected structure, by combining indirect three-dimensional (3D) inkjet printing and freeze-drying methods. Further, the effect of 45S5 Bioactive glass particles of different sizes (<100 nm and 6 μm) on mechanical strength and cell behavior was investigated. The results demonstrated that the hierarchical structure in this scaffold was... 

We present fabrication, characterization, and experimental results describing electrical actuation and readout of the mechanical vibratory response of electrospun ZnO nanofibers. For a fiber with an approximate radius of 200 nm and a length of 70 ìm, a resonance frequency around 3.62 MHz with a quality factor (Q) of about 235 in air at ambient conditions is observed. It is shown that the measured frequency of the resonance is consistent with results from finite element simulations. Also, the measurements were performed in an enclosed chamber with controlled levels of ethanol vapor. The adsorption of ethanol causes a shift in the resonance frequency of the fibers, which can be related to the... 

Strategic health, safety, and environmental management system (HSE-MS) involves systematic and cooperative planning in each phase of the lifecycle of a project to ensure that interaction among the industry group, client, contractor, stakeholder, and host community exists with the highest level of health, safety, and environmental standard performances. Therefore, it seems necessary to assess the HSE-MS performance of contractor(s) by a comparative strategic management model with the aim of continuous improvement. The present Strategic Management Model (SMM) has been illustrated by a case study and the results show that the model is a suitable management tool for decision making in a contract... 

We propose two minimum-mean-square-error (MMSE) estimation methods for denoising non-Gaussian first-order autoregressive (AR(1)) processes. The first one is based on the message passing framework and gives the exact theoretic MMSE estimator. The second is an iterative algorithm that combines standard wavelet-based thresholding with an optimized non-linearity and cycle-spinning. This method is more computationally efficient than the former and appears to provide the same optimal denoising results in practice. We illustrate the superior performance of both methods through numerical simulations by comparing them with other well-known denoising schemes  

With regard to increased sustainability, managers not only need to know WHAT is needed for their company to improve, but also HOW to do so in detail is equally important. Energy management (EnM) is a pillar to the transformation of industrial energy systems towards enhanced energy efficiency and increased sustainability. One way to develop more and improve EnM both practically and theoretically is to shed light on how the combination of techniques and operation can contribute to successful EnM. This paper, therefore, through investigation of 10 Swedish foundries aims to present the structure of the energy strategy and associated practices at first; second, to assess industry’s EnM program... 

Due to the shortcomings of the traditional construction project management system, there is a feeling among those involved in this industry that new tools and approaches should be used to facilitate simple and complex operations. On the contrary, there is no integrated database for all construction sectors, and of course the relationship between these sectors is a major problem for any construction project. The technology and tool that overcomes many of these shortcomings is BIM technology. This paper seeks to identify all the challenges that hinder the successful implementation of BIM and determine important challenges based on Z-DEMATEL-ISM Hybrid approaches. The DEMATEL method is used to... 

Nowadays, many enterprises commit to the extraction of actionable knowledge from huge datasets as part of their core business activities. Applications belong to very different domains such as fraud detection or one-to-one marketing, and encompass business analytics and support to decision making in both private and public sectors. In these scenarios, a central place is held by the MapReduce framework and in particular its open source implementation, Apache Hadoop. In such environments, new challenges arise in the area of jobs performance prediction, with the needs to provide Service Level Agreement guarantees to the enduser and to avoid waste of computational resources. In this paper we... 

Crashworthiness, energy absorption capacity, and safety are important factors in the design of lightweight vehicles made of fiber-reinforced polymer composite (FRP) components. The relatively recent emergence of the nanotechnology industry has presented a novel means to augment the mechanical properties of various materials. As a result, recent attempts have contemplated the use of nanoparticles to further improve the resiliency of resins, especially when resins are used for mating FRP components. Therefore, a comprehensive understanding of the response of nanoreinforced polymer composites, subjected to various rates of loading, is of paramount importance for developing reliable structures.... 

Self-adaptive systems are systems that automatically adapt in response to environmental and internal changes, such as possible failures and variations in resource availability. Such systems are often realized by a MAPE-K feedback loop, where Monitor, Analyze, Plan and Execute components have access to a runtime model of the system and environment which is kept in the Knowledge component. In order to provide guarantees on the correctness of a self-adaptive system at runtime, the MAPE-K feedback loop needs to be extended with assurance techniques. To address this issue, we propose a coordinated actor-based approach to build a reusable and scalable model@runtime for self-adaptive systems in the...