Sharif Digital Repository

Recycling of asphalt pavements has received much attention in recent years for its environmental and economical benefits. Because of increase in costs of raw materials and energy carriers, reuse of a high portion of reclaimed asphalt pavements (RAP) eliminates an enormous amount of waste and reduces the cost of hot-mix asphalt (HMA) mixtures. There are some problems in high-RAP mixtures such as high content of fine aggregate and filler, low temperature cracking potential because of higher stiffness of RAP binder, and low mixture workability. In this research, RAP fractionation was used to sort out and eliminate fine aggregate and filler. An organic-based softening agent was used to improve... 

Blood is one of the most important biological organs. Red blood cell (RBC), as the most abundant cell of blood, plays an important role at life of the living bodies. Unique mechanical properties of RBCs enable them to pass through very narrow vessels. Any abnormality in these mechanical properties will disorder the function of the cell and many diseases affect these properties too. Studying the mechanical properties of RBCs is very importantin that it could result in a disease diagnostic method in a single-cell level. In this thesis we have tried to measure the viscoelastic properties of a single RBC by an optical trap through a passive method. This measurement is made through studying the... 

Optical tweezer is a highly focused laser beam that could be used to trap micro and nano particles in three dimensions. It could be used to measure(or apply) piconewton range forces. Most of the optical tweezers experiments have been done in liquid mediums. In last few years, trapping particles which are floating in gas mediums(called aerosols) have been considered extensively. In this thesis, the changes in trap stiffness and conversion factor due to changes in laser power, trapping depth and particle are evaluated. It is shown that changing these three parameters, cause considerable changes in trap stiffnes and conversion factor. Linear behavior of trap stiffness versus laser power,... 

The ever increasing usage of modified binders in road construction requires that the effect of different modifiers on the performance characteristics of the asphalt binder be determined through laboratory testing. The current Superpave protocol for performance grading asphalt binders has proven to be insufficient to properly characterize modified binders, thus researchers have searched for other testing methods to complement or possibly replace some of the Superpave tests. Most notable are the time sweep test for fatigue resistance, the multiple stress creep and recovery test (MSCR) for rutting resistance and the direct tension test (DTT) for low temperature cracking characteristics. In the... 

It is widely recognized today that excess moisture in pavement layers, when combined with heavy truck traffic and moisture-susceptible materials, can reduce the service life. Temperatures below freezing can also contribute to durability problems of saturated materials. A major objective in pavement design is to keep the base, subbase, subgrade, and other susceptible paving materials from becoming saturated or even being exposed to constant high moisture levels over time. The use of subsurface drainage has gained popularity over the past two decades, and many pavement agencies now routinely specify drainable pavement structures to reduce moisture-related problems in avements. In this... 

Crumb rubber, produced from shredding of scrap or refused tires, is one of the most commonly used modifiers of asphalt. Asphalt rubber, in addition to mitigating some of the environmental problems of disposing scrap tire, improves the flexural strength of pavement, extends the life of pavement and reduces the maintenance costs. The properties of asphalt rubber are highly dependent on the type and composition of base asphalt, type and amount of crumb rubber, and the production method.The goal of this research is to investigate the performance properties of asphalt rubbers produced from Iranian asphalt and crumb rubber, using an industrially feasible method. The Superpave testing procedure was... 

Although there are several popular and standardized mix design methods for hot-mix asphalt, there is no universally accepted mix design method for cold in-place recycling (CIR). The varieties of recycling machinery, materials, quality control limitations, etc. have contributed to this problem. Most of CIR laboratory mix designs are based on 4-inch molds and maximum aggregate size of 1inch. The use of single unit train, which is the most common machinery used for CIR, results in poor control of aggregate gradation, especially when distresses such as fatigue cracking exist. This may lead to presence of aggregate sizes larger than 1 inch. In this case the use of 4-in mold is no longer... 

Modified binders have received a lot of attention in recent years because of their enhanced performance. Modification of binders, however, generally requires higher production temperatures that lead to increased energy consumption and more greenhouse gases. Warm Mix Asphalt additives such as Sasobit are applied to decrease the production temperatures. The objective of this study is to investigate the fatigue characteristics of modified binders utilized in WMA; therefore the influence of Sasobit as well as short term aging on fatigue characteristics of neat and modified binders were studied. The experimental design included one base binder and four modified binders. The base binder is a... 

Early failure of pavement is one of the most important problems. As the research conclusions in Iran, Non-conformancity is the most important cause of this problem.Quality management system, Audits and expert systems are the solutions. This research provides an Audit system for quality management system of batch-type asphalt plants as the preliminary solution.A state survey conducted and useful part of state programs had been considered. After developing software, The system functionality has been tested  

Microfluidics is a field of science that studies micron-scale characteristics of fluids. In this scale fluids show fascinating behavior far beyond our expectation compared to their large-scale counterparts. One of such peculiar behavior is the mixing of two different liquids flowing inside a microchannel. Due to low Reynolds number, the flow inside such a channel would be dominated by laminar behavior. In this regime mixing of the fluids is only mediated by molecular diffusion which is a rather slow process. In the current thesis, we utilized the rotating ability of optical tweezers to construct an active micromixer for Microfluidics. In order to do this we used birefringent microbeads. The... 

The base of dielectrophoresis(DEP) technique has been demonstrated through electro-dynamic interactions between an applied non-uniform AC electric field and induced distributed dipoles within a polarized. In particle manipulation and/or separation using the DEP method, knowledge of precise DEP force of a particle is essential in designing a DEP device and improving its separation efficiency and accuracy. In most DEP studies related to particle manipulation and/or separation, however their absolute DEP forces remain unknown[2]. Insufficient information regarding the DEP behavior of particles can result in preventing a strategic maneuver for efficient particle manipulation and/or separation... 

Intensity or phase Modulation of a wavefront is possible by means of optical devices. Placing a grating or lens on the way of a wavefront, will alter the phase or intensity of it and this will make a diffraction pattern. Spatial Light Modulator (SLM) is an optical device which is the most important part of a video projector. One can apply grating, lens and other phases on the wavefront using this device.In this project we used SLM to modify phase of laser beam and then we made many focal points such that they could displace independently. The result of this project can be used in designing and creating a holographic optical tweezers.Moreover, A. Einstein proved that the light could be... 

Viscoelastic properties of biological fluid play an important role on biological organs. As an example we all know that Red blood cells must have high flexibility to pass thorough thin capillary.This high flexibility come partially from cytoplasm and 2 dimensional membrane and partially from polymeric fluid inside the cell(hemoglobin). So, for recognizing mechanical properties of a whole cell we also need to study the same properties just for fluid inside the cell. for this general purpose through this project we are going to measure viscoelastic properties of any polymeric fluid by optical tweezers which has an ability for measuring displacement of micron particle with accuracy of nm. first... 

Mobile edge computing (MEC) is a promising technology that aims to resolve cloud computing’s issues by deploying computation resources at the edge of mobile network and in the proximity of users. The advantages of MEC include reduced latency, energy consumption, and load on access and mobile core networks, to name but a few. Despite all the aforementioned advantages, the mobility of mobile network users causes the traditional MEC architecture to suffer from several issues, such as decreased efficiency and frequent service interruption. One of the methods to manage users’ mobility is virtual machine (VM) migration, where the VM containing the user’s task is migrated to somewhere closer to... 

Today, energy crises and the environmental pollution have become serious problems for the human being. To address these problems, extensive efforts have been made to replace fossil fuels with other clean energy resources such as fuel cells. In the meantime, polymer electrolyte fuel cells are very important as they are now commonly used in the field of transportation, and their importance become even more obvious as we consider the fact that the by-products from electricity production by such cells are simply water and heat. This research studies the efficiency of the polymer called “polysulfone” as an electrolyte fuel cell, which has the above named mechanical thermal and chemical... 

Hydrated lime has been used as an anti-stripping agent with acceptable performance. Numorous studies have been conducted to evaluate hydrated lime as an anti-stripping agent, however effect of hydrated lime on performance properties of asphalt mixture has not been fully addressed. In the present study, the effect of hydrated lime was investigated. In this study, three methods of adding hydrated lime were evaluated. These methods consist of a) adding dry hydrated lime to dry aggregates, b) adding hydrated lime to the binder to form mastic, and c) adding slurry lime to dry aggregates.
More uniform distribution of hydrated lime on aggregate surface in the slurry method improved performance...