Sharif Digital Repository

Various composite friction materials containing 40. vol.% organic binder (phenolic resin plus styrene-butadiene-rubber (SBR)) with varying phenolic-resin/SBR ratio were prepared. The content of phenolic resin in each composite was indicated by the resin value (RV) index ranging between 0 and 100%. The composites with RVs greater than 50% form resin-based friction materials in which the primary binder is the phenolic resin. For RVs less than 50%, the composites become the rubber-based materials where the primary binder is the SBR. The analysis of mechanical properties exhibited that the conformability of the composites increases upon incorporation of SBR. The frictional analysis revealed that... 

The present study was an attempt to examine the effects of carbon and cellulose fibers on the tribological characteristics of rubber-based friction materials (RBFMs). A fiber free RBFM as a reference material and a series of fiber included RBFMs at different volume fractions were prepared by two-roll mill. The friction tests were per-formed at different sliding velocities and various drum temperatures. The mechanical properties and surface microstructure of friction specimens were also examined. It was revealed that the carbon fiber infiuences slightly the coefficient of friction (COF) of RBFM but it improves the wear resistance and the fade behavior considerably. It reduces the drum... 

Stable control of water level of drum is of great importance for economic operation of power plant steam generator systems. In this paper, a linear model of the boiler unit with time varying parameters is used for simulation. Two transfer functions between drum water level (output variable) and feed-water and steam mass rates (input variables) are considered. Variation of model parameters may be arisen from disturbances affecting water level of drum, model uncertainties and parameter mismatch due to the variant operating conditions. To achieve a perfect tracking of the desired drum water level, two sliding mode controllers are designed separately. Results show that the designed controllers... 

An attempt was made to examine thermal effects as well as fade and wear characteristics of rubber-based friction materials (RBFMs). A series of RBFMs with and without fiber reinforcements were prepared. The fiber reinforcements used were carbon fiber, cellulose fiber and aramid pulp. A semi-empirical model describing the correlation of coefficient of friction (COF) and temperature was presented. The effectiveness of the model was evaluated using the experimental data. The results revealed that the model parameters for a given composite show a significant change above a critical sliding velocity, i.e. 300 rpm. This behavior was speculated to be due to the transition of rubbery state of the... 

In ubiquitous computing environments, many devices and agents interoperate with each other and use services provided by others. But the problem is that there may be requests that can not be fulfilled by available services. A solution to this problem is to use service brokers that compose existing services and create new value added services that can fulfill the clients' requests. In this paper, we present an architecture for a context-aware service broker that not only is able to compose services for responding to new requests, but also considers the context of its clients for providing customized and personalized outputs and behaviors. © 2006 IEEE  

In this paper, the crack propagation in ductile materials is simulated under cyclic and dynamic loading. The adaptive finite element method is used to model the discontinuity due to crack propagation. The ductile fracture assumptions and continuum damage mechanics are utilized to model the material rupture behavior. Moreover both the rate-independent and rate-dependent constitutive equations are elaborated and the crack closure effect and combined hardening model are discussed in addition to some aspects of finite element implementation. Finally, a comparison is performed between the numerical simulation results and those of experiments to illustrate the robustness of proposed computational... 

There have been significant developments in the design and application of algorithms for both one-dimensional signal processing and multidimensional signal processing, namely image and video processing, with the recent focus changing from a step-by-step procedure of designing the algorithm first and following up with in-depth analysis and performance improvement to instead applying heuristic-based methods to solve signal-processing problems. In this book the contributing authors demonstrate both general-purpose algorithms and those aimed at solving specialized application problems, with a special emphasis on heuristic iterative optimization methods employing modern evolutionary and swarm... 

Stable control of water level of drum is of great importance for economic operation of power plant steam generator systems. In this paper, a linear model of the boiler unit with time varying parameters is used for simulation. Two transfer functions between drum water level (output variable) and feed-water and steam mass rates (input variables) are considered. Variation of model parameters may be arisen from disturbances affecting water level of drum, model uncertainties and parameter mismatch due to the variant operating conditions. To achieve a perfect tracking of the desired drum water level, two sliding mode controllers are designed separately. Results show that the designed controllers... 

Due to demands for the economical operations of power plants and environmental awareness, performance control of a boiler-turbine unit is of great importance. In this paper, a nonlinear Multi Input-Multi Output model (MIMO) of a utility boilerturbine unit is considered. Drum pressure, generator electric output and drum water level (as the output variables) are controlled by manipulation of valves position for fuel, feedwater and steam flows. After state space representation of the problem, two controllers, based on gain scheduling and feedback linearization, are designed. Tracking performance of the system is investigated and discussed for three cases of 'near', 'far' and 'so far' setpoints.... 

Modern search engines use link structure of the World Wide Web in order to gain better results for ranking the results of users' queries. One of the most popular ranking algorithms which is based on link analysis is HITS. It generates very accurate outputs but because of huge amount of online computations, this algorithm is relatively slow. In this paper we introduce PHITS, a parallelized version of the HITS algorithm that is suitable for working with huge web graphs in a reasonable time. For implementing this algorithm, we use WebGraph framework and we focus on parallelizing access to web graph as the main bottleneck in the HITS algorithm. © 2006 IEEE  

In this paper, the crack propagation in ductile materials is simulated under cyclic and dynamic loading. The adaptive finite element method is used to model the discontinuity due to crack propagation. The ductile fracture assumptions and continuum damage mechanics are utilized to model the material rupture behavior. Moreover both the rate-independent and rate-dependent constitutive equations are elaborated and the crack closure effect and combined hardening model are discussed in addition to some aspects of finite element implementation. Finally, a comparison is performed between the numerical simulation results and those of experiments to illustrate the robustness of proposed computational... 

A hot gas generator is a compact heat exchanger that produces high temperature or enthalpy gases. This paper presents two methods for controlling the system. The first one is an adaptive sliding mode controller that is a Lyapunov based method and proposed to confront the dynamic modeling deficiencies and system uncertainties. The second one is a linear adaptive controller that gives a new attractive ability to the system which can track a complicated requested path. Each of the presented controllers has some capabilities that may be preferred to other. In this paper, these methods are extensively compared by several transient inputs. On the other hand, since heat exchangers are typically...