Sharif Digital Repository

With the advent of various advanced materials, the idea of flying like birds has attracted considerable attention in recent years. In addition, aeroacoustics has become an important issue and is being widely studied. In this work, based on the shape of Owls’ wings, an attempt was made to improve the aeroacoustic and aerodynamic performances of conventional aircraft wings. For this purpose, wings with different elements, namely, square, triangular, and semicircular, on their top surface were examined. In addition, three different spatial distributions of the elements according to the Owl’s wings shape were considered. For incompressible airflow, aerodynamic and aeroacoustic parameters of wing... 

Heavy-duty gas turbines are usually devised in power plants to generate electrical energy. Sudden failure in any of its parts or subdivisions will result in a decrement of the efficiency of the system or emergency shutdown of the system. The highest risk of failure in these turbines is subjected to the hot gas path (HGP) of the turbine. Due to the existence of uncertainty in diagnosing process or damage growth, in this research, a modified risk-based probabilistic failure analysis model using Bayesian networks (BN) was developed. First, a failure model was developed using the Fault Tree Analysis, and then it is transformed into a BN model. This model is capable of predicting and diagnosing... 

First stage nozzles are considered as one of the most critical components in the heavy-duty gas turbines because of their operational in-service condition in the hot gas path. In the present research, the failure analysis of a first stage nozzle in a 159 MW gas turbine is investigated in order to specify the modes and mechanisms of the failure and their root causes. Various examinations including macroscopic and visual inspection of the nozzle outer surface, the micro examination of the fracture surface, chemical analysis and metallographic analysis were carried out to complete the investigation. The micro and macro examinations revealed cracks, erosion and oxidation damages in the nozzle... 

The resonant frequencies and torsional sensitivities of an atomic force microscope (AFM) with assembled cantilever probe (ACP) are studied. This ACP comprises a horizontal cantilever, a vertical extension and two tips located at the free ends of the cantilever and the extension which makes the AFM capable of simultaneous topography at top-surface and sidewalls of microstructures especially microgears which consequently leads to a time-saving swift scanning process. In this work, the effects of the sample surface contact stiffness and the geometrical parameters such as the ratio of the vertical extension length to the horizontal cantilever length and the distance of the vertical extension... 

The resonant frequencies and flexural sensitivities of an atomic force microscope (AFM) assembled cantilever probe which comprises a horizontal cantilever, a vertical extension and two tips located at the free ends of the cantilever and the extension are studied. This probe makes the AFM capable of simultaneous topography at top-surface and sidewalls of microstructures especially microgears which leads to a time-saving swift scanning process. In this work, the effects of the sample surface contact stiffness and the geometrical parameters such as the ratio of the vertical extension length to the horizontal cantilever length and the distance of the vertical extension from clamped end of the... 

The resonant frequencies and flexural sensitivities of an atomic force microscope (AFM) with assembled cantilever probe (ACP) are studied. This ACP comprises a horizontal cantilever, a vertical extension and two tips located at the free ends of the cantilever and the extension, which makes the AFM capable of simultaneous topography at top surface and sidewalls of microstructures especially microgears, which consequently leads to a time-saving swift scanning process. In this work, the effects of the sample surface contact stiffness and the geometrical parameters such as the ratio of the vertical extension length to the horizontal cantilever length and the distance of the vertical extension... 

Very fine alumina nanoparticles were loaded in novolac type phenolic resin (PF) using solution mixing method. The concentration of nanoalumina in PF was varied between 2.5 to 20 wt%. All the compounds were compression molded and then subjected to scanning electron microscopy (SEM), tensile, flexural, and dynamic mechanical analysis (DMA) tests. SEM analysis showed that the nanoalumina were dispersed uniformly at low concentrations, however, at high concentrations, dispersion was suppressed leading to agglomerates in the composites. Mechanical testing revealed that the nanoalumina had a great influence on the strength and stiffness of PF resin particularly at concentrations below 5 wt%.... 

In this study, the authors propose an analytical model to evaluate the maximum stable throughput for unicast services in vehicular ad hoc networks. In this respect, the authors employ two queueing networks (QNs) to model the mobility patterns of the vehicles as well as the multi-hop packet transmission scenario. In the proposed model, the authors map the features of IEEE 802.11, as well as the details of multi-hop packet transmission, regarding the dynamic status of vehicles, onto suitable parameters of the QNs. In the authors' modelling approach, they take the details of MAC and routing schemes into account by classifying the vehicles based on their mobility patterns and considering their... 

Few works has been focused on the problem of joint distributed data compression and network coding. In this paper we give some examples showing the advantage of broadcast nature of wireless environment as a basis for joint codes design. Also we show that joint coding is possible in the case of multiple unicasts. The idea of this paper can be exploited in an opportunistic manner. Actually, the foundation of our idea is nothing but combining opportunistic network coding (COPE) and distributed source coding using syndromes (DISCUS) for wireless applications. © 2009 IEEE  

Self-repairing is not an advanced ability of articular cartilage. Tissue engineering has provided a novel way for reconstructing cartilage using natural polymers because of their biocompatibility and bio-functionality. The purpose of cartilage tissue engineering is to design a scaffold with proper pore structure and similar biological and mechanical properties to the native tissue. In this study, porous scaffolds prepared from gelatin, chitosan and silk fibroin were blended with varying ratios. Between the blends of chitosan (C), gelatin (G) and silk fibroin (S), the scaffold with the weight per volume ratio of 2:2:3 (w/v) showed the most favorable and higher certain properties than the... 

This paper presents a multi-stage algorithm for QRS complex classification into normal and abnormal categories using an unsupervised sequential beat clustering and a cross-distance analysis algorithm. After the sequential beat clustering, a search algorithm based on relative similarity of created classes is used to detect the main normal class. Then other classes are labeled based on a distance measurement from the main normal class. Evaluated results on the MIT-BIH ECG database exhibits an error rate less than 1% for normal and abnormal discrimination and 0.2% for clustering of 15 types of arrhythmia existing on the MIT-BIH database. © 2001 IEEE