Sharif Digital Repository

Generally, in most areas, groundwater level is deep and heat sources (e.g., energy piles)are embedded in unsaturated soil media. Therefore, in order to accurately analyze the soil response close to heat sources, both heat and moisture transport in unsaturated soil domain should be considered. Thermal loading changes the moisture content in the porous media. In this study, the energy conservation and mass fluid continuity equations derived from hydrothermal analysis of a partially saturated soil medium are considered in cylindrical coordinate system. To make the analytical solution possible, partial differential equations (PDEs)are turned into ordinary differential equations (ODEs), through... 

Ground Source Heat Pumps (GSHPs) have been installed all around the world to harvest shallow geothermal energy for heating and cooling building envelopes. However, the high initial cost of these systems (e.g., drilling and installation costs) limits the popularity and total usage of GSHPs around the world. To reduce the initial cost of these systems, geothermal heat exchangers are combined with structural components of the building, such as deep foundations, or energy walls. Energy piles or thermo-active foundations that serve dual purposes have been widely utilized in the last two decades in many developed countries. However, in most of the developing countries like Iran, there are several... 

Thermal loadings in saturated (two-phase) clays induce excess pore water pressure due to the difference in the thermal expansion coefficient of the pore volume and the pore water. The gradual dissipation of the excess pore water pressure causes thermal volume reduction which is known as thermal consolidation. However, thermal consolidation in a three-phase soil system such as unsaturated soil is more sophisticated. In this paper, an analytical model for thermal consolidation around a heat source embedded in unsaturated clay or in calyey soils containing two immiscible fluids is developed based on the effective stress concept. Governing equations, including energy, mass, and momentum balance... 

In this study, Ni-doped ZnO-TiO2 nanocomposites were synthesized and used to chlorpyrifos photocatalytic degradation vicinity of UV and sunlight conditions. The prepared samples were characterized using various characterization techniques, including XRD, EDS, BET also FT-IR analyses to investigate structural, morphological, and optical properties. The different operational factors effect such as irradiation time, pH, and photocatalyst dose was examined to find the optimum photocatalytic degradation conditions. According to the results, maximum removal efficiency of 75.5 % and 92.3 % were achieved at an irradiation time of 140 min, with nanocomposites dosage of 0.2 g and pH = 9 for visible... 

High chemical resistance is the main prerequisites for materials that are intended to be utilized in usages such as chemicals storage containers production. Nanocomposites of epoxy resin containing nanoclay, CaCO3 and TiO2 nanoparticles were prepared and their chemical resistance was studied. Moreover, the effect of electron beam irradiation was explored. TEM micrographs proved the dispersion of nano-size particles in the polymeric matrix. XRD patterns showed an exfoliated structure for nanocomposite containing 1 % nanoclay and intercalated structures for nanocomposites with higher nanoclay contents. SEM showed the pits that appeared in epoxy/nanoclay structure due to chemical corrosion.... 

In this paper we introduce and propose novel signaling methods and receiver structures based on advanced binary optical logic gates for fiber-optic code division multiple access (FO-CDMA) systems using all-optical signal processing. In the proposed system the users of the network are categorized into multiple classes. Users of each class transmit at the same power level but different from the levels of the other classes' users. Using a combination of optical OR, AND and XNOR logic gates for the receiver structure we show that such a network not only takes the full advantages of all-optical signal processing but also demonstrates a considerable throughput efficiency when compared to ordinary... 

Energy piles have been used around the world to harvest geothermal energy to heat and cool residential and commercial buildings. In order to design energy geo-structures, thermo-mechanical response of the geothermal pile must be carefully understood. In this paper, a small scale physical model is designed and a series of heating thermal cycles with various vertical mechanical loads are performed. The instrumented pile is installed inside a dry sand bed. Changes in pile head displacement, shaft strains and pile and sand temperatures are monitored using an LVDT, strain gauges and thermocouples, respectively. Prolonged heating cycles, which would continue until boundary temperature changes,... 

Similarity measure is an important key in image registration. Most traditional intensity-based similarity measures (e.g. sum-of-squared-differences, correlation coefficient, mutual information and correlation ratio) assume a stationary image and pixel-by-pixel independence. These similarity measures ignore the correlation among pixel intensities; hence, a perfect image registration cannot be achieved especially in the presence of spatially varying intensity distortions and outlier objects that appear in one image but not in the other. It is supposed here that non-stationary intensity distortion (such as bias field) has a sparse representation in the transformation domain. Based on this... 

The registration of images is a fundamental task in numerous applications in medical image processing. Similarity measure is an important key in intensity based image registration. Here, we propose correntropy measure as similarity measure in mono modal setting. Correntropy is a important measure between two random variables based on information theoretic learning and kernel methods. This measure is useful in non-Gaussian signal processing. In this paper, this measure is used in image registration. Here, we analytically illustrate that this measure is robust in presence of spiky noise (impulsive noise). The experimental results show that the proposed similarity has better performance than... 

Similarity measure is an important key in image registration. Most traditional intensity-based similarity measures (e.g., SSD, CC, MI, and CR) assume stationary image and pixel by pixel independence. Hence, perfect image registration cannot be achieved especially in presence of spatially-varying intensity distortions and outlier objects that appear in one image but not in the other. Here, we suppose that non stationary intensity distortion (such as Bias field or Outlier) has sparse representation in transformation domain. Based on this as-sumption, the zero norm (ℓ0)of the residual image between two registered images in transform domain is introduced as a new similarity measure in presence... 

Similarity measure is an important block in image registration. Most traditional intensity-based similarity measures (e.g., sum-of-squared-difference, correlation coefficient, and mutual information) assume a stationary image and pixel-by-pixel independence. These similarity measures ignore the correlation between pixel intensities; hence, perfect image registration cannot be achieved, especially in the presence of spatially varying intensity distortions. Here, we assume that spatially varying intensity distortion (such as bias field) is a low-rank matrix. Based on this assumption, we formulate the image registration problem as a nonlinear and low-rank matrix decomposition (NLLRMD).... 

Similarity measure is an important part of image registration. The main challenge of similarity measure is lack of robustness to different distortions. A well-known distortion is spatially-varying intensity distortion. Its main characteristic is correlation among pixels. Most traditional intensity based similarity measures (e.g., SSD, MI) assume stationary image and pixel to pixel independence. Hence, these similarity measures are not robust against spatially-varying intensity distortion. Here, we suppose that non-stationary intensity distortion has a sparse representation in transform domain, i.e. its distribution has high peak at origin and a long tail. We use two viewpoints of Maximum... 

In this paper, we propose the Object Pursuing based Efficient Routing Algorithm (OPERA) suitable for vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs), esp. in sparse situations. The proposed algorithm is applicable for both moving and fixed destinations. It is based on considering static nodes at each intersection. In this algorithm, we optimize the decision making at intersections, with respect to the connectivity and feasibilty of the roads. To this end, we consider the average delay of each road as the connectivity metric, and the vehicle availability in the transmission range of the intersection as the feasibility metric. By exploiting the related metrics, we select the next road to forward the packet... 

Similarity measure is a main core of image registration algorithms. Spatially varying intensity distortion is an important challenge, which affects the performance of similarity measures. Correlation among the pixels is the main characteristic of this distortion. Similarity measures such as sum-of-squared-differences (SSD) and mutual information ignore this correlation; hence, perfect registration cannot be achieved in the presence of this distortion. In this paper, we model this correlation with the aid of the low rank matrix theory. Based on this model, we compensate this distortion analytically and introduce rank-regularized SSD (RRSSD). This new similarity measure is a modified SSD based... 

We show that multiple Abelian sectors with Stückelberg mass-mixing simply break supersymmetry via Fayet-Iliopoulos D-terms and straightforwardly mediate it to the other sectors. This mechanism naturally realizes a split supersymmetry spectrum for soft parameters. Scalar squared-masses (holomorphic and non-holomorphic) are induced through sizable portals and are not suppressed. Gaugino masses, a-terms and a μ-like term are generated by higher-dimensional operators and are suppressed. The hypercharge is mixed with extra U(1)'s, it's D-term in non-vanishing and supersymmetry is broken in the visible sector too. Scalar tachyonic directions are removed by unsuppressed interactions and hypercharge... 

We present a constant-time randomized distributed algorithms in the congested clique model that computes an O(α)-vertex-coloring, with high probability. Here, α denotes the arboricity of the graph, which is, roughly speaking, the edge-density of the densest subgraph. Congested clique is a well-studied model of synchronous message passing for distributed computing with all-to-all communication: per round each node can send one O(log n)-bit message algorithm to each other node. Our O(1)-round algorithm settles the randomized round complexity of the O(α)-coloring problem. We also explain that a similar method can provide a constant-time randomized algorithm for decomposing the graph into O(α)...