Sharif Digital Repository

The effect of repulsive steepness of the soft-core square well (SCSW) potential model on the second virial coefficient, critical behaviour (two- phase region and the position of critical point), and coordination number are investigated. The soft-core thermodynamic perturbation theory (TPT) presented by Weeks-Chandler-Anderson (WCA) recently developed by Ben-Amotz and Stell (BAS) has been used for the reference system, and the Barker-Henderson TPT for the perturbed system. The Barker-Henderson macroscopic compressibility approximation has been used for all order perturbation terms in which the second-order one is improved by assuming that the molecules in every two neighbouring shells are... 

The effect of compressive Residual Stress (RS) on the Stress Intensity Factors (SIFs) of fretting fatigue cracks was studied using semi-analytical methods. The fretting fatigue of a half-plane in contact with a flat rounded pad was taken into consideration, and RS such as those created by shot-peening were added to the model. Studies of several RS profiles were accomplished to consider the effect of changes in RS caused by stress relaxation during service or pretreatment and manufacturing discrepancies regarding parameters. The distribution of dislocations method was applied to the calculation of the SIFs of these cracks and was shown to be capable of dealing with these kinds of problems. It... 

In this paper, the modeling and impedance-control of a one link flexible robot is presented. The concept of impedance control of flexible link robots is rather new and is being addressed for the first time. The control algorithm is valid for both constrained and unconstrained maneuvers. First, equations of motion and the associated boundary conditions are derived using Hamilton's principle. A linear finite dimensional model is, then, generated in the Cartesian coordinates, using the assumed mode method and by introduction of a proper coordinate transformation. The target impedance is, then, introduced in the Cartesian coordinate system and a control law is designed to realize the proposed... 

In this article, impedance control of a two link flexible link manipulators is addressed. The concept of impedance control of flexible link robots is rather new and is being addressed for the first time by the authors. Impedance Control provides a universal approach to the control of flexible robots, in both constrained and unconstrained maneuvers. The initial part of the paper concerns the use of Hamilton's principle to derive the mathematical equations governing the dynamics of joint angles, vibration of the flexible links and the constraining forces. The approximate elastic deformations are then derived by means of the Assumed-Mode-Method (AMM). Using the singular perturbation method, the... 

The effect of anharmonicity on the adsorption of CO molecules on the Ni(111) surface has been investigated. The DFT calculations are used to obtain the effective adsorption potential of the CO molecule on the Ni(111) surface. First, using an appropriate slab model, the geometry of adsorption system corresponding to hep, fcc, bridge, and on-top sites with p(2 × 2) arrangement and coverage of 0.25 ML is optimized by the DFT calculations using a plane wave basis set and ultrasoft pseudopotentials; this gives the hep site as the most stable site with De = 185 kJ/mol, for which the equilibrium distance of CO from the surface and C-O bond length on the surface are found to be 1.31 and 1.192 Å,... 

The results of a flume investigation of surface wave motion over a fluidized bed are presented. It is shown that a resonant wave interaction between a surface wave and two interfacial waves at the interface of the fresh water and the fluidized bed is a strong mechanism for instability of the interface and the subsequent mixing of the layers. The interfacial waves are subharmonic to the surface wave and form a standing wave at the interface. The interaction is investigated theoretically using a fully viscous interaction analysis. It is shown that surface wave height and viscous effects are the determining factors in the instability mechanism. The results indicate that the net effect of... 

An offshore structure is exposed to environmental loading and cyclic stress variations throughout its life. This would result in the possibility of fatigue cracking in its members. Cracks in these structures usually initiate around welded areas, then grow progressively from the heat-affected zone to base metal through the thickness of the tubular members. Therefore, fatigue life improvement of offshore structures is of great importance. In this paper, structural analysis of an offshore platform is carried out and the critical joint is specified. The welding process is simulated and the residual stresses due to the welding are determined. Experimental residual stress measurement is carried... 

Low back pain (LBP), the leading cause of disability worldwide, remains one of the most common and challenging problems in occupational musculoskeletal disorders. The effective assessment of LBP injury risk, and the design of appropriate treatment modalities and rehabilitation protocols, require accurate estimation of the mechanical spinal loads during different activities. This study aimed to: (1) develop a novel 2D beam-column finite element control-based model of the lumbar spine and compare its predictions for muscle forces and spinal loads to those resulting from a geometrically matched equilibrium-based model; (2) test, using the foregoing control-based finite element model, the... 

By technology down scaling in nowadays digital circuits, their sensitivity to radiation effects increases, making the occurrence of soft errors more probable. As a consequence, soft error rate estimation of complex circuits such as processors is becoming an important issue in safety- and mission-critical applications. Fault injection is a well-known and widely used approach for soft error rate estimation. Development of previous FPGA-based fault injection techniques is very time consuming mainly because they do not adequately exploit supplementary FPGA tools. This paper proposes an easy-to-develop and flexible FPGA-based fault injection technique. This technique utilizes debugging facilities... 

The objective of the present study is to model and analyzing a two-level supply chain with reverse information exchange in which the manufacturer and the retailer are aware of the status of each other's stocks. To take advantages of this method of information exchange, manufacturers and retailers change their stock policies from traditional base-stock policy to a state-dependent two-level base-stock policy. Then, they change their ordering policy according to the other side's stock availability. Applying the mentioned method reduces the total cost of system as well as decreasing the average amount of manufacturer's inventory and improving the waiting time of walk-in customers  

In this work, we report on fabrication and characterization of dye-sensitized solar cells based on TiO2 nanotube/nanoparticle (NT/NP) composite electrodes. TiO2 nanotubes were prepared by anodization of Ti foil in an organic electrolyte. The nanotubes were chemically separated from the foil, ground and added to a TiO2 nanoparticle paste, from which composite NT/NP electrodes were fabricated. In the composite TiO2 films the nanotubes existed in bundles with a length of a few micrometres. By optimizing the amount of NT in the paste, dye-sensitized solar cells with an efficiency of 5.6% were obtained, a 10% improvement in comparison to solar cells with pure NP electrodes. By increasing the... 

We study the Kane-Mele-Hubbard model both at half-filling and away from half-filling using a slave-boson mean-field approach at zero temperature. We obtain a phase diagram at half-filling and discuss its connection to recent results from quantum Monte Carlo, cellular dynamical mean field, slave-rotor, and Z 2 mean-field studies. In particular, we find a small window in parameter space where a spin-liquid phase with gapped spin and charge excitations reside. Upon doping, we show the spin-liquid state becomes a superconducting state by explicitly calculating the singlet pairing order parameters. Interestingly, we find an "optimal" doping for such superconductivity. Our work reveals some of the... 

This paper presents a low cost fault-tolerant technique so called OWHR (Operand Width Aware Hardware Reuse) to ALU design in embedded processors. The OWHR technique is motivated by two facts: (1) Many of the produced and consumed values are narrow-width values in the embedded processors, i.e. they have leading zeros or ones in their most significant bits. This indicates that only a fraction of the circuit is performing useful operations when a particular arithmetic or logic circuit in the ALU is operating on narrow-width values; (2) other circuits of the ALU are not used, when a particular arithmetic or logic circuit is being utilized to perform a specific operation in the ALU in the... 

Dye-sensitized solar cells (DSCs) with nanotubular TiO2 electrodes of varying thicknesses are compared to DSCs based on conventional nanoparticulate electrodes. Despite the higher degree of order in one-dimensional nanotubular electrodes, electron transport times and diffusion coefficients, determined under short-circuit conditions, are comparable to those of nanoparticulate electrodes. The quasi-Fermi level, however, is much lower in the nanotubes, suggesting a lower concentration of conduction band electrons. This provides evidence for a much higher diffusion coefficient for conduction band electrons in nanotubes than in nanoparticulate films. The electron lifetime and the diffusion length... 

Single event upsets (SEUs) and single event transients (SETs) are major reliability concerns in deep submicron technologies. As technology feature size shrinks, digital circuits are becoming more susceptible to SEUs and SETs. A novel SEU/SET-tolerant latch called feedback redundant SEU/SET-tolerant latch (FERST) is presented, where redundant feedback lines are used to mask SEUs and delay elements are used to filter SETs. Detailed SPICE simulations have been done to evaluate the proposed design and compare it with previous latch designs. The results show that the SEU tolerance of the FERST latch is almost equal to that of a TMR latch (a widely used latch which is the most reliable among the... 

In this study, the different parts of carthamus tinctorius plant, including petal (SPE), leaf (SLE), and shoot (SSE), have been extracted. Adsorption of the extracts on mild steel in 3.5 wt. % NaCl solution was evaluated employing electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS), potentiodynamic polarization, and electrochemical noise measurements (EN). The field-emission scanning electron microscopy (FE-SEM) and attenuated total reflectance Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (ATR-FTIR) were employed to appraise the morphology of the samples surface subjected to the test solutions. According to the EIS results, the maximum adsorption efficiency belonged to the solution containing 1 g L−1 of... 

Some physical and aerodynamic properties of pistachio nut and its kernel were determined in order to design processing equipment and facilities. In this study, several physical properties of pistachio nut and its kernel were evaluated as a function of moisture content in the range of 4.10-38.10% (w.b.). The length, width, height, shell splitting and unit mass of pistachio nut ranged from 16.07 to 17.25 mm, 12.41 to 12.75 mm, 10.98 to 12.24 mm, 3.59 to 4.47 mm and 0.90 to 1.30 g respectively as the moisture content increased. The respected value for pistachio kernel varied from 15.21 to 16.22 mm, 9.11 to 10.53 mm, 8.73 to 9.66 mm and 0.51 to 0.80 g, respectively. In pistachio nut, the... 

The continuous decrease in CMOS technology feature size increases the susceptibility of such circuits to single event upsets (SEU) caused by the impact of particle strikes on system flip flops. This paper presents a novel SEU-tolerant latch where redundant feedback lines are used to mask the effects of SEUs. The power dissipation, area, reliability, and propagation delay of the presented SEU-tolerant latch are analyzed by SPICE simulations. The results show that this latch consumes about 50% less power and occupies 42% less area than a TMR-latch. However, the reliability and the propagation delay of the proposed latch are still the same as the TMR-latch. the reliability of the proposed latch... 

Thin-layer drying characteristics of pistachio nuts were determined experimentally as a function of temperature, relative humidity and air velocity. Six mathematical models (Page model, modified Page model, exponential model, diffusion model, two term exponential model and Thompson model) for describing the thin-layer drying behavior of pistachio nuts were investigated. Tests were conducted using four air temperatures (25, 40, 55 and 70 °C), three air velocities (0.5, 1.0 and 1.5 m/s) and two levels of relative humidity (5% and 20%) and three replications for each treatment. Out of the six models considered, Page model was found to be the most suitable for describing the drying behavior of... 

Shaped charges are devices used for cutting or penetrating different aerial, on land, and underwater targets, based on the concentration of the explosion energy to the liner. The purpose of this study is to present a practical review of the studies related to shaped charges in the last twenty years (2000–2020). In this regard, these studies have been reviewed in two different categories for ordinary and advanced shaped charges. In the case of ordinary shaped charges, different aspects including shaped charges against different targets, different types of shaped charges (such as linear shaped charge and explosively formed penetrators), and theoretical advancements are presented. On the other...