One of the most important issues in agricultural machinery section is tyre-soil interactions. In this study, a single wheel tester was used to follow experiments in controlled conditions in a soil bin. A Goodyear 12. 4-28, 6 ply tractor drive tyre was operated at three vertical loads of 6, 9 and 12 kN, three inflation pressures of 80, 120 and 160 kPa and three moisture content of soil: 11. 20, 14. 86 and 18. 68 % d. b to investigate the effect of the variables on these parameters: contact area, contact pressure, compaction, and soil apparent electrical conductivity. It was found that medium contact pressure had a direct relation with vertical load, inflation pressure and moisture content. A regression model with R-square of 0. 946 was achieved to predict contact pressure. Soil electrical conductivity changes was predicted with acceptable determination coefficient of 0. 850 by using of vertical load, inflation pressure and moisture content. Determination coefficient magnitude for models to predict resistance to soil penetration (cone index) using soil apparent electrical conductivity, decreased when moisture content was increased. The vertical load and inflation pressure were found two factors controlling the soil apparent electrical conductivity changes in low and high moisture content, respectively. Error percentage in using soil apparent electrical conductivity parameter to estimate the penetration resistance increased with increasing moisture content.

Wenner direct contact method is a method of estimating apparent electrical conductivity (ECa) of agricultural soils in situ. This method can be affected by factors such as quality of electrodes in contact with soil, type of employed electric current, moisture content, clay content and compaction of soil. In this research, the effect of electrode type (rod and plate) and electric current type (direct and alternating) on accuracy of estimating soil ECa has been investigated to design a soil EC mapper. A prototype soil EC meter based on direct contact method has been made. The device assessed by a completely randomized experimental design with factorial layout. The independent variables were soil salinity (five levels), electrodes type (two levels) and current type (two levels).Four soil types with different clay contents from regions around Mashhad city (Khorasan Razavi, Iran) have been used with three replications. The results analyzed with SPSS17 software and validated with 1:1 soils water extract EC’s. Significant difference between electrodes types and electric current types was observed. The correlation coefficients of direct contact measured EC’s with soil water extract EC’s was between 0.94 and 0.99 for all treatments. Based on the results of this research, plate type electrodes and AC current were recommended for the design of tractor rear mounted soil EC mapper.

In this paper, the method of determining thermal contact resistance of wavy surfaces is discussed exactly. For determining the thermal contact resistance of real contacts, a new method has been presented. In this method, assuming a regular sinusoidal surface profile, the real contact area in terms of applied forces has been determined. Then thermal contact resistance has been calculated. Testing 6 kinds of insulator’s combinations with wavy surfaces has approved the reliability of the analysis. The results of experiments and analysis had good agreement with each other.

Direct current electrical resistivity imaging is provided by measuring the vertical and horizontal electrical potential variations of subsurface structures using surface and borehole records. To recover the resistivity tomograms from the observed data, a non-linear inverse problem is required to be iteratively solved. A 2. 5-dimensional forward modeling based on the finite-difference method with rectangular meshes is also formulated. The two-dimensional reconstruction of earth resistivity data is implemented using a smoothness constrained inversion algorithm (i. e. Occam’s method), wherein a Gauss-Newton technique for updating the sensitivity function is proposed. After verifying the accuracy and efficiency of the forward modeling and the sensitivity function calculation, the inversion algorithm is tested on synthetic data from both geometrically simple and complicated bodies and a real data set. A stopping criterion based on the noise level, roughly estimated using the method of reciprocal resistance measurements, is also provided leading to preventing over-or under-interpreted structure during the inversion process. The numerical experiments reveal that the proposed inversion algorithm provides stable inversion results and an acceptable representation of the main features and structure of the models without producing spurious effects. Furthermore, to deal with the reliability of the recovered models, a model sensitivity analysis is implemented using the resolution density distribution. All used formulations and concepts are part of a Matlab source code developed during this study.

Electrical resistance tomography (ERT) provides images of the electrical properties of subsurface materials leading to the distinction of different Earth’s interior structures. The accuracy of electrical resistance imaging is strongly affected by the topographical variations so that the lack of incorporation of topography information into the inversion process may produce erroneous anomalies in the resistivity section. Owing to the significance of the topography effects on the resistivity measurements, we use a Schwarz-Christoffel transformation approach to incorporate the irregular surface into the 2.5-dimensional forward solution in the framework of the finite difference method. This approach is implemented on synthetic cases to illustrate how the resistivity measurements are dependent on the topographic irregularities. Numerical experiments demonstrate that in the presence of topographic features between current and potential electrodes, the resistivity response does not reflect the realistic resistivity values of the subsurface even in the case of a homogeneous resistivity distribution.

Common methods of controlling setting, hardness, process of strength growth of concrete are tests for determining the setting time of mortar (ISIRI 392) and concrete (ISIRI 6046) and determining the compressive strength of concrete (ISIRI 3206). Since these physical and mechanical methods do not fully reflect the behavior of concrete and also it’ s time and money consuming, application of electrical resistance of concrete has been investigated. Therefore, in this study, an extensive laboratory operation was designed. In the first stage, 11 samples of cement were prepared, the phases of which varied, but due to laboratory cementation, their fineness and grading were almost the same. Physical and chemical analysis of cement samples were performed. In the next step, 22 concrete mixtures with 11 cement samples were prepared, so that 11 mixtures with the title of control (without additives) and 11 mixtures with constant dosage of commercial super plasticizer (based on poly carboxylate). Compressive strength tests has been performed at ages of 7, 28 and 90 days. Also, an electrical resistance test was performed, which was performed regularly from the time of cement contact with water until 31 days later. The results showed that at least three peaks of 8, 16 and 23 days in the electrical resistance curve are seen along the test time. In almost all samples, the electrical resistance is reduced to about 3 hours, which indicates the setting time of the concrete. Based on the results of this study, formula was presented.

General faults in regular electric railway systems can be detected by implementing the specific protection functions such as ground fault or sensitive earth fault. Otherwise, in ungrounded electric railway systems which are using both feeding and return contact rails at the same time, fault detection cannot be performed with the above-mentioned function. Due to recent growth in electric railway networks especially in metropolises, it is an essential requirement to improve operation and safety indexes by using efficient fault preventing and fault clearing method in minimum time.In this research, a new fault diagnosing method is developed by using frequency response of contact rail system. This technique is based on observing pattern changes that are caused by some expected faults such as the broken contact rail, contact rail to ground faults on feed or return circuit frequency response.

Different types of contact, including contact between node pairs, any-contact of nodes, and contacts of the entire network, are used to characterize social relations in mobile social networks. Different modes of routing, from the point of view of message delivery semantics, encompass unicasting, multicasting, any-casting, and broadcasting. Studies have shown that using probability distribution functions of contact data, which is mainly assumed to be homogeneous for nodes, improves the performance of these networks. However, there exists an important challenge in studies on distributions. A lot of works apply the distribution of one type of contact to other types. Hence in routing applications, it causes to use of the distribution of one type of contact for any mode of routing. This study provides a complete solution to model each type of homogeneous contact data distribution and to use them in different modes of routing. We propose a routing algorithm that uses this new model. Results show that our solution improves the average latency of comparing methods Epidemic, TCCB, and DR about 3.5-times, 30%, and 45%, respectively. It achieves a delivery rate of about 5% and 6%, and average latency about 6% and 8% better than that of DR and TCCB, respectively.