Sharif Digital Repository

Bridged bithiazoles (5,5′-ethylene-4,4′-bithiazoles) are synthesized as a good chelating agent  

Accelerated bridge construction is recognized as an important method for bridge owners to accelerate the delivery of highway bridge projects. While the potential advantages of accelerated bridge construction are recognized, it is difficult for transportation specialists to quantify the risks and benefits of using accelerated bridge construction compared with conventional construction for specific bridge replacement or rehabilitation projects. A tool set, based on the analytic hierarchy process, is prepared for transportation specialists and decision makers to determine whether accelerated bridge construction is more effective than traditional construction for a given bridge replacement or... 

This paper presents an overview of a study on the design and analysis aspects of the Lake Urmia Bridge in Iran. For years there have been several detailed investigations on this subject. Here, these alternatives are discussed and, then, results of analyses for a proposed solution, a floating bridge, are presented. These aspects include environmental loads, structure and the mooring system. © Sharif University of Technology  

The dynamic interaction problem of moving vehicles on uniform suspension bridges is studied. The resulting variable moving loads acting on the bridge are of great practical importance to both bridge and automotive engineers. The vehicle, including the occupants, is modelled as a planar half-car with six degrees of freedom, and the bridge is assumed to obey the Euler-Bernoulli beam theory with arbitrary conventional boundary conditions. However, the numerical simulations presented here are for the case of a vehicle travelling at a constant speed on a bridge with simply supported end conditions. Owing to the continuously moving location of the loads on the bridge, the governing differential... 

This paper aims to develop a deteriorated bridge maintenance strategy that ensures the safe operation of steel structures and minimizes the total risk. Five common failure modes are considered for the deteriorated bridge: flexure, shear, deflection, fatigue failure for girder, and chloride attack for the concrete deck. Time-dependent and system reliability analyses are carried out to find the probability of failure under these failure modes. Risk-cost optimization is then used to determine the maintenance strategy. This method was applied to a working example. It was found that the developed maintenance strategy can predict when, where, and what to maintain for a bridge to ensure its safe... 

This paper presents a single-phase Cascaded H-Bridge (CHB) inverter for photovoltaic applications. The proposed control strategy permits the optimum control of each string of PV panels in different insolation conditions. Based on the presented mathematical analysis, an analytic constraint is derived to check the stable operation of the inverter. A modified MPPT control strategy is also proposed based on this new condition. This strategy enhances the stability margins of the system by changing the operating point of some PV arrays. In this approach, the extracted power from high power cell is reduced to prevent instability issue and to avoid injection of highly distorted current into the... 

Multilevel converters are mainly used in high power applications (usually more than a few hundred kW). It is therefore important that they can continue working under faulty condition. In this paper, a new method is proposed to improve performance of CHB inverter under faulty condition. The proposed method will be compared with existing methods in term of voltage availability. The converter is simulated in Simulink and the results are provided. These results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed scheme, and are in accordance with the theoretical results  

Two unique heteronuclear Schiff base complexes of Cu(II), [{Cu(L)Na(ClO4)}2(μ-H2L)] (1) and Ni(II), [{Ni(L)Na(BF4)}2(μ-H2L)] (2) were synthesized and characterized by different spectroscopic methods as well as X-ray crystallography. The Schiff base ligand (H2L) was synthesized from the condensation meso-1,2-diphenyl-1,2-ethylenediamine with 3-methoxysalicylaldehyde. The 3d metal ions in these complexes have been accommodated by the inner N2O2 compartment of the Schiff base ligand, while the O2O′2 outer compartment has accommodated the Na(I) ion (O and O′ denote the phenolic and methoxy oxygen atoms, respectively). Besides, a Schiff base ligand has doubly bridged the M(II)/Na(I) moieties via... 

A large portion of the railway bridge stock in many countries is comprised of masonry arch bridges. During recent years, more attention has been paid to the maintenance of such structures. Rehabilitation and retrofitting methods have been proposed to enhance the performance of masonry arch bridges and extend their service life. Because a large portion of forces exerted on such structures comes from the railway track and passing trains, structural elements are added to the track to reduce the forces transmitted to bridges. One such element is the ballast mat, which, according to suppliers, has a positive impact on the structural performance of the track. This paper tries to assess the effects... 

This paper presents the design and the application of a new self-powered hybrid electromagnetic damper that can harvest energy while mitigating the vibration of a structure. The damper is able to switch between an energy harvesting passive mode and a semi-active mode depending on the amount of energy harvested and stored in the battery. The energy harvested in the passive mode resulting from the suppression of vibration is employed to power up the monitoring and electronic components necessary for the semi-active control. This provides a hybrid control capability that is autonomous in terms of its power requirement. The proposed hybrid circuit design provides two possible options for the... 

The wet granular material creates networks in which interstitial liquid provides capillary bridges needed to hold grains together. There is an optimal fraction of the interstitial liquid in which the bridges are formed and the friction coefficient is minimal. We found that the size of the grains affects the friction of wet granular media. Our observations demonstrates that the optimum volume fraction, in which the friction coefficient is minimized, increases with grain size, but for sand immersed in water, this minimum friction coefficient itself increases with size and for glass beads immersed in silicone oil it decreases, indicating that the shape of the grains also has an effect on this... 

Reduction of large tensile stresses and cost-efficiency has made unbonded isolators an attractive option as an isolation system. Following this idea and the results obtained by various researchers, it is shown that unbonded steel-reinforced elastomeric bearings (SREBs), which are used and designed for non-seismic actions, have inherently acceptable characteristics in tolerating large shear deformations for a cost-effective isolation system and can provide improved structural performance. However, this capacity is neglected in the design process. The current article presents an experimental program to analyze the mechanical properties of steel-reinforced natural rubber bearings without the... 

Asymmetric Half-Bridge converters are widely used as the front-end DC-DC converter in Distributed Power Systems. Added Range windings are proposed to increase the efficiency of these converters. Activating and deactivating these windings produce transient effect in the output voltage. In this study, an optinml controller based on the Linear Quadratic Gaussian (LQG) method is designed for the efficient regulation of the output voltage of an asymnetric half-bridge controller. The intent of implementing LQG control is to ninimize the output voltage transient produced by range switch operation due to input voltage variations. Simulation results are presented to compare the performance of the new... 

The ride comfort of high-speed trains passing over railway bridges is studied in this paper. The effects of some nonlinear parameters in a carriage-track-bridge system are investigated such as the load-stiffening characteristics of the rail-pad and the ballast, rubber elements in the primary and secondary suspension systems. The influence of the track irregularity and train speed on two comfort indicators, namely Sperling's comfort index and the maximum acceleration level, are also studied. Timoshenko beam theory is used for modelling the rail and bridge and two layers of parallel damped springs in conjunction with a layer of mass are used to model the rail-pads, sleepers and ballast. A... 

In order to get better understanding on the response of floating bodies, different design aspects of mooring lines has been investigated in this paper. Mooting lines are categerized into two types; the catenary settling on the sea floor (type 1) and the limited one which has no dead-length on sea floor (type 2). It has been observed that the stiffness of both types may be well predicted by Jain's formulation and in the design process of floating bodies the mooring lines may be replaced by uncoupled horizontal and vertical springs. On the other hand, the anchor capacity against sliding and release from the mean still water has been studied in this paper. From the results of a parametric... 

Integral abutment bridges have many advantages over bridges with expansion joints in terms of economy and maintenance costs. However, in the design of abutments of integral bridges temperature loads play a crucial role. In addition, seismic loads are readily transferred to the substructure and affect the design of these components significantly. Currently, the European and American bridge design codes consider these two load cases separately in their recommended design load combinations. In this paper, the importance and necessity of combining the thermal and seismic loads is investigated for integral bridges. A 2D finite element combined pile-soil-structure interactive model is used in this... 

Movements of the wheel loads and their sequential entry onto the bridges are known as the two root causes for the vibrations of the railway bridges. It is possible to reduce the levels of the unwanted bridge deck oscillations by introducing one or more size adjusted wagon(s) in the train configuration. The added wagon(s) are of different size(s) compared with the other cars in the train configuration. This can disturb the periodicity in the wheel loading. Consequently, it can interfere with the resonance phenomena and prevent the bridge from excessive vibrations. The purpose of this research is to calculate proper sizes for the anti-resonance rail vehicles. Such vehicles need to fulfil the... 

Liquid bridges are believed to play an important role in improving the recovery of fractured reservoirs. However, little is known about the stability of liquid bridges in fractured media at the pore scale. In this work, a glass micromodel representing a stack of two blocks was used at different tilt angles to monitor the frequency and stability of liquid bridges formed during free-fall gravity drainage as a function of tilt angle. It was observed that by increasing the tilt angle, the liquid bridge frequency decreased but its stability increased. This resulted in higher ultimate recovery. In addition, it was found that during the first half of the experiments, the number of bridges was... 

Theoretical and experimental verification of the pipe damper was investigated in Part I of the two companion papers. In this paper, the application of the pipe damper to structures is examined. In particular, single span slab-girder bridges are considered for analytical investigations. A practical detail for the installation of the pipe damper is introduced. Nonlinear dynamic time history analyses are conducted on bridges equipped with the pipe damper and the results are compared with ordinary bridges. Bridge span, ground motion and the pipe length are varied in the analyses. Results show that the pipe damper is a reliable and economical metallic-yielding device that can easily be installed...