Sharif Digital Repository

In the present study, the behavior of fin pile under lateral loading was investigated by ABAQUS software. First, the generated model was verified against an available experimental small-scale test in the literature. Having conducted verification, a study was carried out on the fin pile dimensions under lateral loading. Different parameters, such as pile diameter, fin’s length, and width, were studied. Moreover, a study on the fin’s aspect ratio by setting fin’s area constant was conducted, and then, optimum fin’s ratio was obtained. The results indicated that both fin’s length and width could improve pile efficiency under lateral loading, yet fin’s length had a more critical impact, and... 

This study focuses on identifying damage in reinforced concrete (RC) beams using time-domain modal testing and wavelet analysis. A numerical model of an RC beam was used to generate various damage scenarios with different severities and locations. Acceleration time histories were recorded for both damaged and undamaged structures. Two damage indices, DI_MW and DI_SW, derived from the wavelet analysis, were employed to determine the location and severity of the damage. The results showed that different wavelet families and specific mother wavelets had varying effectiveness in detecting damage. The Daubechies wavelet family (db2, db6, and db9) detected damage at the center and sides of the RC... 

In engineering practice, land subsidence is considered a threat to the infrastructure and lifelines massively distributed globally. In this study, a combined methodology of full consistency decision-making (FUCOM) and the geographical information system (GIS) was employed to assess the vulnerability of Iran to subsidence. Accordingly, a new hierarchical FUCOM-GIS framework was developed. The FUCOM was first used to evaluate the weight of various causative factors. Afterward, the GIS was employed to superimpose several layers to produce a land subsidence susceptibility map (LSSM) of Iran. The results revealed water stress, groundwater depletion, soil type, geological time scale, and rainfall... 

Land subsidence associated with using natural groundwater resources for serving the growing population needs has been receiving extensive research attention in the literature over the past few decades. The water content fluctuation in the of subsurface soil layers significantly impacts the land subsidence. The key objective of this study is to predict changes in water content profiles in soil layers over a long period of time using a deep learning-based approach. A convolution neural network algorithm that is commonly used in Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications is modified in the present study for processing in-situ measurement water content profiles. The approach used in the proposed... 

The soil water retention curve (SWRC) provides information for a wide range of geoenvironmental problems, such as analyses of transient two-phase flow, the bearing capacity and shear strength of unsaturated soils. Many past studies have shown experimentally the effects of stress on the SWRC. Unfortunately, direct stress-dependent water retention measurements are relatively time-consuming and generally require special equipment and a certain level of expertise. This study primarily aimed to develop a novel predictive framework within the context of soft computing to capture the dependency of the SWRC on several variables, with an emphasis on stress and soil type. To achieve this, the three... 

A state-of-the-art review has been conducted in this work on soil constitutive modeling, which has emphasized on: soil type, ground-water conditions, loading conditions, structural behavior, constitutive relation discipline, and dimensions. By extension also, the soil constitutive applications were reviewed on the bases of: single discipline dealing with soil mechanical properties constitutive modeling which included slope stability problems, bearing capacity, settlement of foundations, earth pressure problems, soil dynamics, soil structure interaction, thermal and hydrological conditions; bi-discipline (coupled problems) which solve problems related to thermomechanical (freeze/thaw... 

An accurate examination of deformability of rock samples in response to any change in stresses is deeply dependent on the reliable determination of properties of the rock as analysis inputs. Although Young’s modulus (E) can provide valuable characteristics of the rock material deformation, the direct determination of E is considered a time-consuming and complicated analysis. The present study is aimed to introduce a new hybrid intelligent model to predict the E of granitic rock samples. Hence, a series of granitic block samples were collected from the face of a water transfer tunnel excavated in Malaysia and transferred to laboratory to conduct rock index tests for E prediction. Rock index... 

An accurate examination of deformability of rock samples in response to any change in stresses is deeply dependent on the reliable determination of properties of the rock as analysis inputs. Although Young’s modulus (E) can provide valuable characteristics of the rock material deformation, the direct determination of E is considered a time-consuming and complicated analysis. The present study is aimed to introduce a new hybrid intelligent model to predict the E of granitic rock samples. Hence, a series of granitic block samples were collected from the face of a water transfer tunnel excavated in Malaysia and transferred to laboratory to conduct rock index tests for E prediction. Rock index... 

Stabilization of slopes is considered as the aim of the several geotechnical applications such as embankment, tunnel, highway, building and railway and dam. Therefore, evaluation and precise prediction of the factor of safety (FoS) of slopes can be useful in designing these important structures. This research is carried out to evaluate the ability of Monte Carlo (MC) technique for the forecasting the FoS of many homogenous slopes in the static condition. Moreover, the sensitivity of the FoS on the effective parameters was identified. To do this, the most important factors on FoS, such as angle of internal friction (Formula presented.), slope angle (Formula presented.) and cohesion (Formula... 

Stabilization of slopes is considered as the aim of the several geotechnical applications such as embankment, tunnel, highway, building and railway and dam. Therefore, evaluation and precise prediction of the factor of safety (FoS) of slopes can be useful in designing these important structures. This research is carried out to evaluate the ability of Monte Carlo (MC) technique for the forecasting the FoS of many homogenous slopes in the static condition. Moreover, the sensitivity of the FoS on the effective parameters was identified. To do this, the most important factors on FoS, such as angle of internal friction (∅) , slope angle (α) and cohesion (C) were investigated and used as the... 

The cost constraints imposed on construction projects specially ground improvements by the deep mixing technique (DMT) highlight the role of efficient optimization. In this study, a systematic artificial neural network (ANN)-based method to address this practical issue is presented. To achieve this goal, the mutual information method is firstly used to select the most important input parameters for training. Secondly, different ANN architectures are examined to find the network with the smallest error by training and optimizing several multi-layer perceptron networks using a grid search-based technique. The model is then generalized by employing the K-fold and Hold-out cross-validation... 

In the open-pit mines and civil projects, drilling and blasting is the most common method for rock fragmentation aims. This article proposes a new hybrid forecasting model based on firefly algorithm, as an algorithm optimizer, combined with the adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system for estimating the fragmentation. In this regard, 72 datasets were collected from Shur river dam region, and the required parameters were measured. Using the different input parameters, six hybrid models were constructed. In these models, 58 and 14 data were used for training and testing, respectively. The proposed hybrid models were then evaluated in accordance with statistical criteria such as coefficient of... 

In the open-pit mines and civil projects, drilling and blasting is the most common method for rock fragmentation aims. This article proposes a new hybrid forecasting model based on firefly algorithm, as an algorithm optimizer, combined with the adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system for estimating the fragmentation. In this regard, 72 datasets were collected from Shur river dam region, and the required parameters were measured. Using the different input parameters, six hybrid models were constructed. In these models, 58 and 14 data were used for training and testing, respectively. The proposed hybrid models were then evaluated in accordance with statistical criteria such as coefficient of... 

A low power analog to digital converter (ADC), based on a pipelining method employed in successive approximation register (SAR) architecture is presented. This structure is a two-stage pipeline SAR ADC with asymmetrical time interleaved (TI) channels, aimed to reach sampling rate as high as about threefold of a conventional SAR ADC while benefiting from its low power consumption and small area. Passive residue conversion without inter-stage amplifier and symphonic collaboration of stages are employed to design a low power, high speed, and accurate converter. In the proposed architecture, every signal sample experiences equal comparator offset during its conversion due to the applied novel... 

Due to wireless communication’s rapid growth, the need for low power integrated transceivers is increasing. The receiver power is a major limiting factor, and the radio frequency (RF) front-end is often its significant power consuming part. Therefore, system-level design in which the overall specifications are distributed among RF front-end building blocks such that the minimum total power is consumed is crucial. A complete system-level design method for a low power RF front-end is presented in this paper. For this purpose, the performance of each block is modeled by its current and overdrive voltage. An analytical associated with a search-based optimization technique is employed to derive... 

In this research work, the pressure leaching of chalcopyrite concentrate with oxygen was studied. Experiments were carried out under conditions of the solid–liquid ratio of 0.1, agitation speed of 750 rpm, and sulfuric acid concentration of 2 M in a stainless-steel autoclave system under 0.6 to 1 MPa oxygen gas. Central composite design was used to design experiments, and three factors of temperature, time, and oxygen pressure were selected as the design variables. A linear model for %Cu and a quadratic model for %Fe were proposed by Minitab Software. The results showed that temperature is the most effective factor in chalcopyrite leaching. Under optimal conditions, 93.08% of copper with the... 

The current study presents a numerical investigation on turbulent hydrothermal characteristics in a wavy passage equipped with discontinuous twisted tapes. The working fluid is water and passage walls are kept under constant wall temperature. The effect of Reynolds number (Re = 2500, 4500, 6500, 8500 and 10500), twist angle (TA = 90∘ and 180∘) and inclination angle (IA = 15∘ and 30∘) on velocity fields and streamlines, temperature contours, Nusselt number, friction factor, turbulent kinetic energy (TKE), thermal performance factor (TPF), energy efficiency factor (EEF) and entropy generation rate are evaluated. More uniform temperature and velocity fields can be found as both wavy passage and... 

This paper addresses the multiple allocation hub set-covering problem considering backup coverage and mandatory dispersion of hubs. In the context of this paper, it has been assumed that a flow is covered if there are at least Q possible routes to satisfy its demand within a time bound. Moreover, there is a lower limit for the distance between hubs in order to provide a degree of dispersion in the solution. Mathematical formulation of this problem is given, which has O( n2) variables and constraints. Computational experiments carried out on the well-known CAB dataset give useful insights concerning model behavior and its sensitivity to parameters  

The maximal covering location problem (MCLP) is a challenging problem with numerous applications in practice. Previous publications in the area of MCLP proposed models and presented solution methodologies to solve this problem with up to 900 nodes. Due to the fact that in real-life applications, the number of nodes could be much higher, this paper presents a customized Genetic Algorithm (GA) to solve MCLP instances, with up to 2500 nodes. Results show that the proposed approach is capable of solving problems with a fair amount of exactness. In order to fine-tune the algorithm, Tukey's Least Significant Difference (LSD) tests are employed on a set of test problems