Sharif Digital Repository

Kinetics of crystallization in an amorphous (Fe0.5Co 0.5)77Si11B9Cu0.6Nb 2.4 (at.%) alloy was investigated using differential scanning calorimetry (DSC). Transformed fraction as a function of temperature was obtained by accurate DSC measurement and the experimental data analyzed with Vyazovkin model-free kinetic method. Reconstructed form of the experimental kinetics model, g(α), clearly showed the crystallization mechanism do not belongs to a single model but almost follows the Avrami-Erofe'ev. Magnetic coercivity and hysteresis loss values of the annealed samples at 823 K were 7.5 A m-1 and 1.2 J m-3, compared to 17.1 A m-1 and 37.1 J m-3 for as spun samples. Magnetic measurements show the... 

This study aims to show the efficiency of a proposed spectral matching technique for the reduction of required ground motions in the dynamic time history analysis. In this non-stationary spectral matching approach, unconstrained optimization is employed to adjust the signal to match a target spectrum. Adjustment factors of discrete wavelet transform (DWT) coefficients associated with the signals are then considered as decision variables and the Levenberg-Marquardt algorithm is employed to find the optimum values of DWT coefficients. This matching algorithm turns out to be quite effective in the spectral matching objective, where matching at multiple damping ratios can be readily achieved.... 

In a MIMO (Multiple Input Multiple Output) radar system, proper design of transmit signal and receive filter is an advantageous tool to improve the detection performance. Thus, in this paper, we consider the problem of transmit code and receive filter design, in order to maximize the Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR) at the receiver while enforcing a similarity constraint between the transmit space-time code (STC) and a reference STC which has a desirable ambiguity function. We will show that by solving such constrained optimization problem through successive iterations, our proposed method leads to satisfactory results  

This paper presents a new Compressive Sensing (CS) scheme for detecting network congested links. We focus on decreasing the required number of measurements to detect all congested links in the context of network tomography. We have expanded the LASSO objective function by adding a new term corresponding to the prior knowledge based on the relationship between the congested links and the corresponding link Betweenness Centrality (BC). The accuracy of the proposed model is verified by simulations on two real datasets. The results demonstrate that our model outperformed the state-of-the-art CS based method with significant improvements in terms of F-Score  

The onset of fretting fatigue is characterized by material microstructural changes in which the extent of the damage is comparable to grain size, and hence, the microstructure characteristics could have a significant effect on fatigue crack initiation. In this paper, a three-dimensional finite element crystal plasticity framework is presented for simulation of the fretting fatigue. Controlled Poisson Voronoi tessellation (CPVT) method is employed to generate the polycrystalline region. In the CPVT method, regularity parameter controls the shape of grains. In this study, the impact of grain size and regularity parameter on crack initiation life and initiation site has been investigated.... 

The onset of fretting fatigue is characterized by material microstructural changes in which the extent of the damage is comparable to grain size, and hence, the microstructure characteristics could have a significant effect on fatigue crack initiation. In this paper, a three-dimensional finite element crystal plasticity framework is presented for simulation of the fretting fatigue. Controlled Poisson Voronoi tessellation (CPVT) method is employed to generate the polycrystalline region. In the CPVT method, regularity parameter controls the shape of grains. In this study, the impact of grain size and regularity parameter on crack initiation life and initiation site has been investigated.... 

The purpose of this paper is to present efficient and accurate analytical expressions for large amplitude free vibration analysis of single and double tapered beams on elastic foundation. Geometric nonlinearity is considered using the condition of inextensibility of neutral axis. Moreover, the elastic foundation consists of a linear and cubic nonlinear parts together with a shearing layer. The nonlinear governing equation is solved by employing the variational iteration method (VIM). This study shows that the second-order approximation of the VIM leads to highly accurate solutions which are valid for a wide range of vibration amplitudes. The effects of different parameters on the nonlinear... 

In this paper, the instability of cantilevered horizontal composite pipes is investigated. To this aim, the lateral flow forces are modelled as a distributed lateral force and the nozzle effect is modelled as a compressive axial follower force and a concentrated end mass. The coupled bending-torsional equations of motion are derived using Hamilton's principal and Galerkin method. In order to obtain the stability margin of the pipe, the standard Eigen value problem is solved. Finally, effects of elastic coupling parameter and nozzle aspect ratio are considered on the stability margin of the pipe and some conclusions are drawn  

Multiple sequence alignment (MSA) is one of the basic and important problems in molecular biology. MSA can be used for different purposes including finding the conserved motifs and structurally important regions in protein sequences and determine evolutionary distance between sequences. Aligning several sequences cannot be done in polynomial time and therefore heuristic methods such as genetic algorithms can be used to find approximate solutions of MSA problems. Several algorithms based on genetic algorithms have been developed for this problem in recent years. Most of these algorithms use very complicated, problem specific and time consuming mutation operators. In this paper, we propose a... 

This paper presents a decentralized self-adjusting reactive power controller for the autonomous operation of a multi-bus medium voltage (MV) microgrid. The main objective of the proposed control strategy of each distributed generation (DG) unit is to compensate the reactive power of its local loads and to share the reactive power of the nonlocal loads among itself and other DG units. The proposed control strategy includes an improved droop controller whose parameters are adjusted according to the reactive power of the local loads. A virtual inductive impedance loop is augmented to the voltage controller to enhance the steady state and transient responses of the proposed reactive power... 

A linear arrangement φ of an undirected graph G = (V, E) with |V| = n nodes is a bijective function φ:V → {0, ..., n - 1}. The cost function is cost(G,φ)=∑uv∈E|(φ(u)-φ(v))| and opt(G) = min∀φcost(G, φ). The problem of finding opt(G) is called minimum linear arrangement (MINLA). The Minimum Linear Arrangement is an NP-hard problem in general. But there are some classes of graphs optimally solvable in polynomial time. In this paper, we show that the label of each node equals to the reverse of binary representation of its id in the optimal arrangement. Then, we design an O(n) algorithm to solve the minimum linear arrangement problem of Chord graphs  

Incremental learning has been used extensively for data stream classification. Most attention on the data stream classification paid on non-evolutionary methods. In this paper, we introduce new incremental learning algorithms based on harmony search. We first propose a new classification algorithm for the classification of batch data called harmony-based classifier and then give its incremental version for classification of data streams called incremental harmony-based classif ier. Finally, we improve it to reduce its computational overhead in absence of drifts and increase its robustness in presence of noise. This improved version is called improved incremental harmony-based classifier. The... 

The main purpose of this paper is to design a decentralized controller for some car-like (wheeled) multi robots to follow and hunt a moving target. Considering geometric dimensions, mass and moment of inertia, robots are very similar to actual cars in which the outputs of the controller are steering and driving wheel torques. All robots are equipped with range and bearing sensors along with antenna, to communicate radio wave signals. A Kalman filter is implemented to estimate relative position, state variables of the target and state variables of other robots. The controller is designed to carry out the group maneuver of the system, based on the system dynamics analysis of inertial agents,... 

Asphaltene deposition is an issue that has received much attention since it has been shown to be the cause of major production problems. It leads to permeability reduction under the processes of natural depletion as well as hydrocarbon gas/CO2 injection. Though a great deal of researches have focused on studying permeability impairment in reservoir rocks, little is known about the asphaltene deposition mechanisms that control the permeability reduction for Iranian reservoirs. In this work, an experimental effort is made to investigate the permeability impairment of core samples of Iranian oil reservoirs. The experiments are performed on both sandstone and carbonate rock types at reservoir... 

Adaptive Noise Cancellation (ANC) is an effective dual-channel technique for background noise reduction. Due to the presence of uncorrelated noise components at the two inputs in vehicular environments, ANC does not provide sufficient background noise reduction. To alleviate this problem, a complementary linear filter is added to ANC structure. Filter coefficients are determined to make the enhanced signal an MMSE estimation of speech signal. Therefore, the ANC structure is modified to a dual-channel Wiener structure. We prove that this structure is identical to the LMS type ANC which is followed by a Wiener post-filter. A new method is proposed for the noise spectrum estimation in the... 

This paper presents a novel HMM-based speech enhancement framework based on Laplace and Gaussian distributions in DCT domain. We propose analytical procedures for training clean speech and noise models with the aim of Baum's auxiliary function and present two MMSE estimators based on Gaussian-Gaussian (for clean speech and noise respectively) and Laplace-Gaussian combinations in the HMM framework. The performance evaluation is done using SNR and PESQ measures and the results of the proposed techniques are compared with AR-HMM approach. Higher SNR improvement is achieved for the proposed method in the Gaussian-Gaussian case in comparison with AR-HMM and Laplace-Gaussian techniques for both... 

This paper proposes a new control strategy for the islanded operation of a multi-bus medium voltage (MV) microgrid. The microgrid consists of several dispatchable electronically-coupled distributed generation (DG) units. Each DG unit supplies a local load which can be unbalanced due to the inclusion of single-phase loads. The proposed control strategy of each DG comprises a proportional resonance (PR) controller with an adjustable resonance frequency, a droop control strategy, and a negative-sequence impedance controller (NSIC). The PR and droop controllers are, respectively, used to regulate the load voltage and share the average power components among the DG units. The NSIC is used to... 

Brushless Doubly-Fed Machine (BDFM) is a machine which incorporates the robustness of the squirrel cage induction machine while having the speed and power factor control of a synchronous machine. A special kind of rotor called Nested-Loop rotor plays an important part in the BDFM, coupling the two stator fields. In future BDFM will share a large part in wind power market. This paper presents a mathematical model of Brushless Doubly-Fed Machine (BDFM) based on Stator Flux Orientation (SFO) in the positive and negative reference frames under unbalanced grid voltage conditions  

The first spoken dialogue system is developed for the Persian language is introduced. This is a ticket reservation system with Persian ASR and NLU modules. The focus of the paper is on learning the dialogue management module. In this work, real on-line training data are used during the learning process. For on-line learning, the effect of the variations of discount factor (γ) on the learning speed is investigated as the second contribution of the research. The optimal values for γ were found and the variation pattern of the action-value function (Q) in the learning process was obtained. A probabilistic policy for selecting actions is used in this work for the first time instead of greedy... 

An extension to conventional Hidden Markov Model (HMM)-based speech enhancement method is developed. An algebraic method is proposed to estimate gain of speech and noise in order to improve the quality of the estimated speech. Different pronunciations and intonations may affect speech gain. Besides, gain of noise may vary remarkably from one environment to the other one. This may lead in a mismatch between energy contour of trained models and energy contour of noisy speech signal. In this work, speech gain and noise gain are estimated based on an algebraic method simultaneously in order to match gain of noisy speech and noisy model. To carry out this procedure an extension of least square...