Sharif Digital Repository

Discrete ordinates method relies on approximating the integral term of the transport equation with the aid of quadrature summation rules. These quadratures are usually based on certain assumptions which assure specific symmetry rules and transport/diffusion limits. Generally, these assumptions are not problem-dependent which results in inaccuracies in some instances. Here, various methods have been developed for more accurate estimation of the independent angle in S2 approximation, as it is tightly related to valid estimation of the diffusion coefficient/length. We proposed and examined a method to reduce a complicated problem that usually is consisting many energy groups and discrete... 

Discrete ordinates method relies on approximating the integral term of the transport equation with the aid of quadrature summation rules. These quadratures are usually based on certain assumptions which assure specific symmetry rules and transport/diffusion limits. Generally, these assumptions are not problem-dependent which results in inaccuracies in some instances. Here, various methods have been developed for more accurate estimation of the independent angle in S2 approximation, as it is tightly related to valid estimation of the diffusion coefficient/length. We proposed and examined a method to reduce a complicated problem that usually is consisting many energy groups and discrete... 

The presence of the desired signal (DS) in the training snapshots makes the adaptive beamformer sensitive to any steering vector mismatch and dramatically reduces the convergence rate. Even the performance of the most of the existing robust adaptive beamformers is degraded when the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is increased. In this study, a high converging rate robust adaptive beamformer is proposed. This method is a promoted eigenspace-based beamformer. In this paper, a new signal-plus-interferences (SPI) covariance matrix estimator is proposed. The subspace of the ideal SPI covariance matrices is exploited and the estimated covariance matrix is projected into this subspace. This projection... 

In this paper, the effects of van der Waals and Casimir forces on the static deflection and pull-in instability of a micro/nano cantilever gyroscope with proof mass at its end are investigated. The micro/nano gyroscope is subjected to coupled bending motions which are related by base rotation and nonlinearities due to the geometry and the inertial terms. It is actuated and detected by capacitance plates which are placed on the proof mass. The extended Hamilton principle is used to find the equations governing the static behavior of the clamp-free micro/nano gyroscopes under electrostatic, Casimir and van der Waals forces. The equations of static motion are discritized by Galerkin's... 

predicting the latency between hosts in the internet can play a significant rolein the improvement of the performance of many services that use latency distances among hosts as a decision making input. Although, the information regarding the point to point delay among internet peers is required in many applications, such information is not easily available to the peers. Latency data acquisition requires a considerableamount of measurements to be performed at each node in order for that node to keep a recordof its latency to all the other nodes. Moreover, the measurements need to be regularly repeated in order to be updatedagainst the network dynamics where the latency values are frequently... 

The proper orthogonal decomposition (POD) method is used and assessed as a fast technique for estimation of aerodynamics data with variation of some aerodynamics parameters. In this way, four extensions to the POD method are considered for steady viscous/inviscid compressible aerodynamic applications. The first extension is a coupling between the POD method with a cubic spline interpolation, as introduced for inviscid flows. The second and the third ones are essentially new techniques which are introduced here for the first time. In these methods, some additional calibrations (including a kind of filtering and reprojection) are needed to achieving more accurate estimations. The so-called... 

Short-term interaction between heart rate (HR) and physiological measures like blood pressure and respiration reveals relevant information about autonomic nervous system (ANS) function. Complex mathematical models for describing their couplings have been proposed in the literature. However, an accurate estimation of their parameters in an inverse modeling problem is crucial to extract reliable ANS related indices. This study considers a physiologically-based model of the cardiovascular-respiratory system and ANS control that presents the neural and mechanical effects of respiration separately. The estimation method is evaluated on synthetic signals. An accurate estimation of the... 

The flight of unmanned aerial vehicles is often associated with model uncertainties, measurement noises, and environmental disturbances such as wind gust. To mitigate these challenges, the accurate estimation of states is vital. Moreover, the wind model and its parameters should also be estimated and compensated during the flight. In this paper, a multiple model filter is implemented for this purpose. To investigate the performance of the multiple model filter, three different models including constant wind, '1-cosine' model and wind shear model are considered. The multiple model filter utilizes three extended Kalman filter to simultaneously estimate the model of wind, the parameters of the... 

Selecting appropriate features from the vibration condition monitoring data of ball-bearings is one of the main challenges in the application of data-driven methods for remaining useful life prediction purpose. In this article, a new feature based on the high-frequency vibration of ball-bearings is proposed. The feed forward neural network will be used for training and prediction. The experimental data of the bearing accelerated life in the PROGNOSTIA test (published in PHM 2012 IEEE conference) are used to verify the method. The results obtained by applying new features are compared with those of two popular features in the time domain (RMS and kurtosis) for prognostic purpose. Applying the... 

Rolling-element bearing (REB) failure is one of the general damages in rotating machinery. In this manner, the correct prediction of remaining useful life (RUL) of REB is a crucial challenge to move forward the unwavering quality of the machines. One of the main difficulties in implementing data-driven methods for RUL prediction is to choose proper features that represent real damage progression. In this article, by using the outcomes of frequency analysis through the Envelope method, the initiated/existed defects on the ball bearings are identified. Also, new features based on developing faults of ball bearings is recommended to estimate RUL. Early-stage faults in ball bearings usually... 

Effective prevention and treatment management of spinal disorders can only be based on accurate estimation of muscle forces and spinal loads during various activities such as lifting. The infeasibility of experimental methods to measure muscle and spinal loads has prompted the use of biomechanical modeling techniques. A major shortcoming in many previous and current models is the consideration of equilibrium conditions only at a single cross section, rather than along the entire length of the spine, when attempting to compute muscle forces and spinal loads. The assumption of extensor global muscles with straight rather than curved paths and of the spinal segments as joints with no... 

Several reasons such as no free lunch theorem indicates that any learning algorithm in combination with a specific feature selection (FS) technique may give more accurate estimation than other learning algorithms. Therefore, there is not a universal approach that outperforms other algorithms. Moreover, due to the large number of FS techniques, some recommended solutions such as using synthetic dataset or combining different FS techniques are very tedious and time consuming. In this study to tackle the issue of more accurate estimation of NPPs parameters, the performance of the major supervised learning algorithms in combination with the different FS techniques which are appropriate for... 

Speech enhancement problem using hidden Markov model (HMM) and minimum mean square error (MMSE) in cepstral domain is studied. This noise reduction approach can be considered as weighted-sum filtering of the noisy speech signal in which the filters weights are estimated using the HMM of noisy speech. To have an accurate estimation of the noisy speech HMM, vector Taylor series (VTS) is proposed and compared with the parallel model combination (PMC) technique. Furthermore, proposed cepstral-domain HMM-based speech enhancement systems are compared with the renowned autoregressive HMM (AR-HMM) approach. The evaluation results confirm the superiority of the cepstral domain approach in comparison... 

Accurate estimation of scour depth is needed for economic and safe determination of bridge pier foundation depth. Most design criteria are based on maximum scour depth due to the steady design discharge without flow time limit. In this paper, the results are presented of an experimental investigation on local scouring around a single bridge pier under steady and unsteady flow regimes. For unsteady flow, triangular shape hydrographs with repeatable peaks have been chosen. Results show that both sharp and flat increases to the peak of hydrographs have a negligible effect on scour depth for the same base time. An equation is obtained to compute the scour depth due to a specific triangular... 

The finite number of toroidal field coils of a tokamak destroys the perfect axisymmetry of the device. The coils produce a short wavelength ripple in the toroidal magnetic field strength as a field line follows round the torus, which becomes important in transport and confinement properties of plasma. Hence, a quick and accurate estimation of ripple becomes important. We have noticed that a previously reported analytical formulation by Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory team is not applicable to our large aspect ratio tokamak, and have devised a slightly modified form which has greatly improved the accuracy of the analytical fit  

The accuracy of Photoplethysmographic signals is often not adequate due to motional artifacts induced in the recording site. Over recent decades there has been a widespread effort to reduce these artifacts and different methods are used for this aim. Nevertheless there are still some contradictory results reported by different methods about their effectiveness in artifact reduction. In this paper, we aim to compare three of established methods for PPG noise reduction on a unique dataset. Among different reported methods, we have chosen Adaptive Noise Cancellation (ANC), Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) and a newly developed method Cycle-by-cycle Fourier Series Analysis (CFSA) for denoising.... 

The Burr XII distribution can closely approximate many other well-known probability density functions such as the normal, gamma, lognormal, exponential distributions as well as Pearson type I, II, V, VII, IX, X, XII families of distributions. Considering a wide range of shape and scale parameters of the Burr XII distribution, it can have an important role in reliability modeling, risk analysis and process capability estimation. However, estimating parameters of the Burr XII distribution can be a complicated task and the use of conventional methods such as maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) and moment method (MM) is not straightforward. Some tables to estimate Burr XII parameters have been... 

The modulation transfer function (MTF) is well known as a crucial parameter in quality assurance of computed tomography (CT) scanners, which provides detailed information of both contrast and resolution of CT images. Different methods have been introduced and developed to calculate the MTF of CT scanners. However, a robust methodology which accurately estimates the MTF of CT scanners under the use of every range of object electron density and tube current-time product (mAs) has not been reported so far. To this aim, a new wavelet-based circular edge method for MTF measurement has been presented in this work. Owning to the edge spread function (ESF) susceptibility to noise, the approach was... 

Low back pain (LBP), the leading cause of disability worldwide, remains one of the most common and challenging problems in occupational musculoskeletal disorders. The effective assessment of LBP injury risk, and the design of appropriate treatment modalities and rehabilitation protocols, require accurate estimation of the mechanical spinal loads during different activities. This study aimed to: (1) develop a novel 2D beam-column finite element control-based model of the lumbar spine and compare its predictions for muscle forces and spinal loads to those resulting from a geometrically matched equilibrium-based model; (2) test, using the foregoing control-based finite element model, the... 

In this study, accurate estimation of nuclear power plant (NPP) parameters is done using the new and simple technique. The proposed technique using the genetic algorithm (GA) in combination with the Bayesian regularization (BR) and Levenberg- Marquardt (LM) learning algorithms identifies the appropriate architecture for estimation of the target parameters. In the first step, the input patterns features are selected using the features selection (FS) technique. In the second step, the appropriate number of hidden neurons and hidden layers are investigated to provide a more efficient initial population of the architectures. In the third step, the estimation of the target parameter is done using...