Sharif Digital Repository

In engineering practice, the space occupied by high conductivity materials together with the cost are the two elements of major concern. Therefore, seeking for more efficient designs of high conductivity pathways ('inserts'), embedded into a heat generating body constitutes a formidable challenge. The main idea of this paper is to introduce new patterns for the highly conductive pathways, called 'fork-shaped' configurations. Essentially, two types of fork-shaped pathways, 'F1' and 'F2' are introduced. Numerical results demonstrate that, these two configurations of highly conductive pathways, remarkably surpass the latest configurations reported in the literature, with the same amount of high... 

The wellhead flow control valve bodies which are the focal point of this failure case study were installed in some of the upstream facilities of Khangiran's sour gas wells. These valve bodies have been operating satisfactorily for 3 years in wet H2S environment before some pits and cracks were detected in all of them during the periodical technical inspections. One failed valve body was investigated by chemical and microstructural analytical techniques to find out the failure cause and provide preventive measures. The valve body alloy was A216-WCC cast carbon steel. During investigation many cracks were observed on the inner surface of the valve body grown from the surface pits. The results... 

With the proliferation of more complex systems has come the need to find better solutions in both technical and management domains. Such complex systems are usually larger in size, have more parallel operations and contain more complex interfaces (Eisner, 2005). The Design Structure Matrix is a very useful tool in handling such complexities, provided that the system designer can use it properly. This paper addresses how effectiveness & efficiency are defined for a DSM and how these two important characteristics can be achieved. The importance of understanding the solution space in constructing an effective & efficient DSM is discussed and general guidelines are given on configuring the DSM... 

Special superelements are often used to improve the computational efficiency and improve accuracy of finite element modeling. Structures with tapered and spherical geometry exist in many engineering problems. In this work, special tapered and spherical superelements are presented that can be used for modeling of tapered and spherical bodies in thermo mechanical analyses with computational efficiency. The performance of these superelements under thermal and structural loads is demonstrated by presenting several examples and comparing the results with those from conventional 3D brick elements, which shows high accuracy at reduced computational cost  

This article studies effects of store layout in a department store on buyer behavior towards new products. Shelf layout -in terms of parameters which influence buyer behavior- is formulated by two variables; pattern of prices and pattern of popularity. A novel method based on previous works of authors has been developed to measure these two factors, so that they can be compared against shares of department sales statistics. Investigating this relationship helps both retailers and marketing agents to better understand effect of shelf layout in promoting a newly developed product. Results show that correlation between price difference and department share is strong. There is also a weaker... 

Situational Method Engineering (SME)1approaches help construct bespoke software development processes according to the specifications of the project at hand, but they are time-consuming and costly. A Software Process Line (SPrL) tackles this problem by allowing software processes to be constructed for specific project situations through reusing core process assets. Model-Driven Development (MDD) has been used for automating SPrL Engineering (SPrLE); however, existing model-driven SPrLE methods are deficient as to their coverage of key MDD features. We propose a novel model-driven SPrLE approach that aims to address these shortcomings; it can be regarded as a framework that specifies the... 

Sectionalizing switches (SSs) are often presumed to function fully reliable. However, SSs are exposed to have some malfunctions, whereby undermining their ability to improve service reliability. This study presents a model to integrate SS malfunction probability into SS placement problem. The model aims to minimize the total SSs costs as well as customers interruption cost. The proposed model is formulated in mixed integer programing (MIP), which can be easily solved via several available solvers and gain global optimal solution. The proposed model indicates the extent to which the placement problem is affected by uncertainty associated with SSs functionality, and how not considering SSs... 

In traffic engineering, one of the problems presented by slate pavement, besides being costly to repair and maintain, is the insufficient resistance of bitumen against traffic loads in low temperatures. In this study, the effect of synthesized basalt modifier has been assessed via four different tests to improve bitumen performance. Hence, the enhancement of resistance to traffic loads at low temperatures as an essential problem of asphalt superstructure in traffic engineering has been taken into account. The bending beam rheometer test was conducted at three temperatures of-6°C,-12°C, and-18°C, and the softening point and permeability index tests were performed. A Fourier transform infrared... 

Sectionalizing switches (SSs) are often presumed to function fully reliable. However, SSs are exposed to have some malfunctions, whereby undermining their ability to improve service reliability. This paper presents a model to integrate SS malfunction probability into SS placement problem. The model aims to minimize the total SSs costs as well as customers interruption cost. The proposed model is formulated in mixed integer programing, which can be easily solved via several available solvers and gain global optimal solution. The proposed model indicates the extent to which the placement problem is affected by uncertainty associated with SSs functionality, and how not considering SSs... 

Sectionalizing switches (SSs) are often presumed to function fully reliable. However, SSs are exposed to have some malfunctions, whereby undermining their ability to improve service reliability. This paper presents a model to integrate SS malfunction probability into SS placement problem. The model aims to minimize the total SSs costs as well as customers interruption cost. The proposed model is formulated in mixed integer programing, which can be easily solved via several available solvers and gain global optimal solution. The proposed model indicates the extent to which the placement problem is affected by uncertainty associated with SSs functionality, and how not considering SSs... 

There are a vast number of cloud service providers, which offer virtual machines (VMs) with different configurations. From the companies perspective, an appropriate selection of VMs is an important issue, as the proper service selection leads to improved productivity, higher efficiency, and lower cost. An effective service selection cannot be done without a systematic approach due to the modularity of requests, the conflicts between requirements, and the impact of network parameters. In this paper, we introduce an innovative framework, called PCA, to solve service selection problem in the hybrid environment of peer-assisted, public, and private clouds. PCA detects the conflicts between the... 

Urban commuters and road authorities are interested in knowing how well their city can manage traffic conditions. It is challenging to make a fair comparison among global cities due to the absence of a consistent, publicly accessible and inexpensive framework. This study proposes a methodology to compare travel time and average speed in different cities. Large cities have a central core, in which many of the major activities take place. This core is called downtown or the central business district (CBD). In this study, a comparison is made by simulating the morning commute trips from origins outside to destinations inside the CBD. The proposed framework outlines how the city and the CBD... 

Triboelectric nanogenerators (TENG) have rapidly advanced in self-powered sensing in transportation engineering owing to its great sensitivity, high energy harvesting performance, simple structures, and low cost. TENG can be used to improve walker and car safety, detect driver fatigue, assess traffic conditions, and extend the useful life of roads. However, collecting sufficient energy have become a significant issue, limiting the lifespan of such self-powered sensors. A new generation of self-powered sensors bridges the gap between the energy acquired and the energy needed for sensing, computing, storage, and transmission. This article provides an overview of the recent progress of TENG... 

L1 instruction(L1-l) cache misses are a source of performance bottleneck. While many instruction prefetchers have been proposed, most of them leave a considerable potential uncovered. In 2011, Proactive Instruction Fetch (PIF) showed that a hardware prefetcher could effectively eliminate all instruction-cache misses. However, its enormous storage cost makes it impractical. Consequently, reducing the storage cost was the main research focus in instruction prefetching in the past decade. Several instruction prefetchers, including RDIP and Shotgun, were proposed to offer PIF-level performance with significantly lower storage overhead. However, our findings show that there is a considerable... 

Abstract Software product line engineering is a method of producing a set of related products that share more commonalities than variability in a cost-effective approach. Software product lines provide systematic reuse within a product family. Extended feature models with cardinalities are widely used for managing variability and commonality in the software product line domains. In this paper, we use promotion technique in Alloy to formalize constraint based extended feature models with cardinalities and their specialization and generalization. This technique has a significant influence on applying analysis operations on feature models. To show the benefits of the promotion technique, we... 

A new design methodology based on the total value of structures is introduced. This methodology, namely Value Based Design of structures (VBD), uses the advantages of Endurance Time (ET) method. While prescriptive and earlier generations of performance based design approaches commonly try to find structures with the least initial cost, a design approach to directly incorporate the concept of value in design procedure has been formulated here. Reduced computational effort in ET analysis provides the prerequisites to practical use of optimization algorithms in seismic design. A genetic algorithm is used with the objective of minimizing total cost of the building during its lifespan. ET method... 

Soils are usually weak in tension therefore different materials such as geosynthetics are used to address this inadequacy. Worldwide annual consumption of geosynthetics is close to 1000 million m2, and the value of these materials is probably close to US$1500 million. Since the total cost of the construction is at least four or five times the cost of the geosynthetic itself, the impact of these materials on civil engineering construction is very large indeed. Nevertheless, there are several significant problems associated with geosynthetics, such as creep, low modulus of elasticity, and susceptibility to aggressive environment. Carbon fiber reinforced polymer (CFRP) was introduced over two... 

In the present study, the main purpose is investigation of the coatings thickness effect on the fatigue life of AISI 1045 steel. Herein, two different coatings of warm galvanization and hardened chromium have been used on the specimens. Fatigue tests were performed on specimens with different coating thicknesses of 13 and 19 µm. In the high-cycle level, S–N curves are extracted with 13 points for each sample. The results show that the galvanized coating is the most appropriate coating with low thickness, but with significant increasing of coating thickness, the best choice is hardened chromium coating. However, artificial neural network (ANN) has been used as an efficient approach instead of...