One of the most important parameters used for determining the performance of tunnel boring machines (TBMs) is their penetration rate. The parameters affecting the penetration rate can be divided in two categories. The first category is the controllable parameters such as the TBM technical characteristics, and type and geometry of the tunnel, and the second one is the uncontrollable parameters s...

Dams have been always considered as the important infrastructures and their critical values are counted. Hence, evaluation and avoidance of dams’ destruction have a specific importance. Seepage occurrence in dams is an inevitable phenomenon. Despite all the progress in geotechnical engineering, up to now, seepage problem is the main conflict which occurs in dams. This study tried to estimate se...

The optimum design of solar energy systems strongly depends on the accuracy of  solar radiation data. However, the availability of accurate solar radiation data is undermined by the high cost of measuring equipment or non-functional ones. This study developed a feed-forward backpropagation artificial neural network model for prediction of global solar radiation in Makurdi, Nigeria (7.7322  N lo...

We study the spin-1/2 XXZ model on the triangular lattice with a nearest neighbor antiferromagnetic Ising coupling J(z) > 0 and unfrustrated (J(perpendicular) < 0) or frustrated (J(perpendicular) >0) kinetic terms in a zero magnetic field. Incorporating long-range Jastrow correlations over a mean-field spin state, we obtain the variational phase diagram of this model on large lattices for arbit...

the majority of hydraulic processes under a natural condition in a field are carried out under unsaturated flow conditions. the soil moisture retention curve (smrc) is the most important hydraulic characteristic of an unsaturated soil whose knowledge is of prime importance in soil-water studies such as soil conservation, soil erosion, land evaluation, soil reclamation, and water resources manag...

This paper gives an evaluation of low-cost MEMS digital accelerometer errors. Such evaluation is required to construct an appropriate model of the accelerometer. Allan Variance is a simple and efficient method for verifying and modelling the errors by representing the root mean square random drift error as a function of averaging time. In this paper the characteristics of MEMS accelerometers st...

The water quality of the Karaj River was studied through collecting 2137 experimental data set gained by 20 sampling stations. The data included different parameters such as T (temperature), pH, NTU (turbidity), hardness, TDS (total dissolved solids), EC (electrical conductivity) and basic anion, cation concentrations. In this study a multi-layer perceptron artificial neural network model was d...

An optical surface roughness model is presented, which allows a reliable determination of the dielectric function of thin films with high surface roughnesses of more than 10 nm peak to valley distance by means of spectroscopic ellipsometry. Starting from histogram evaluation of atomic force microscopy (AFM) topography measurements a specific roughness layer (RL) model was developed for an organ...