Sharif Digital Repository

Stretching dynamics of polymers in microfluidics is of particular interest for polymer scientists. As a charged polymer, a polyelectrolyte (PE) can be deformed from its coiled equilibrium configuration to an extended chain by applying uniform or nonuniform electric fields. By means of hybrid lattice Boltzmann (LB)-molecular dynamics (MD) simulations, we investigate how the condensed counterions (CIs) around the PE contribute to the polymer stretching in inhomogeneous fields. As an application, we discuss the translocation phenomena and entropic traps, when the driving force is an applied external electric field  

Deformation of single stranded DNA in a translocation process before reaching the pore is investigated. By solving the Laplace equation in a suitable coordinate system and with appropriate boundary conditions, an approximate solution for the electric field inside and outside a narrow pore is obtained. With an analysis based on the "electrohydrodynamic equivalence" we determine the possibility of the extension of a charged polymer due to the presence of an electric field gradient in the vicinity of the pore entrance. With a multi-scale hybrid simulation (LB-MD), it is shown that an effective deformation before reaching the pore occurs, which facilitates the process of finding the entrance for... 

Nanostructured TiO2-SnO2 thin films and powders were prepared by a facile aqueous particulate sol-gel route. The prepared sols showed a narrow particle size distribution with hydrodynamic diameter in the range 17.2-19.3 nm. Moreover, the sols were stable over 5 months, since the constant zeta potential was measured during this period. The effect of Sn:Ti molar ratio was studied on the crystallisation behaviour of the products. X-ray diffraction analysis revealed that the powders were crystallised at the low temperature of 400 °C containing anatase-TiO2, rutile-TiO2 and cassiterite-SnO2 phases, depending on annealing temperature and Sn:Ti molar ratio. Furthermore, it was found that SnO2... 

We propose a method for analyzing the data for the rates of exchange of various currencies versus the U.S. dollar. The method analyzes the return time series of the data as a Markov process, and develops an effective equation which reconstructs it. We find that the Markov time scale, i.e., the time scale over which the data are Markov-correlated, is one day for the majority of the daily exchange rates that we analyze. We derive an effective Langevin equation to describe the fluctuations in the rates. The equation contains two quantities, D(1) and D(2), representing the drift and diffusion coefficients, respectively. We demonstrate how the two coefficients are estimated directly from the... 

Comparison of the traditional linear heating method of TPD with an original stepwise heating scheme was reported for the first time. Stepwise heating TPD was carried out by keeping the temperature constant as soon as ammonia desorption signal rises until the signal returns to the baseline. More ammonia desorption peaks on a SAPO-34 catalyst were identified using TPD with stepwise heating. The effect of temperature ramp on desorption peak broadening in TPD curve was also addressed. The more distinct ammonia desorption peaks in stepwise TPD indicates that ammonia adsorbs in about five or six different ways on SAPO-34, and attribution of different adsorptions may be explained considering some... 

Most part of Iran is dominated by arid and semi-arid areas due to low annual rainfall. The need for production of fresh water from brackish water is considerably high, especially in dry regions. In this study 1 month daily-based experimental data from a solar still site has been reported. The technical and operational problems of this site which finally contributed to the total cease of the site are described. Then a detailed analysis is investigated on progress of a prototype which constructed in order to solve the site's problems. The results of 1 month of experimental data of the final design showed that the last prototype could be used to solve the current problems of the site. The... 

Hydrocracking is one of the most versatile petroleum refining processes for production of valuable products including gasoline, gas oil, and jet fuel. In this paper, a five-parameter continuous lumping model was used for kinetic modeling of hydrocracking of vacuum gas oil (VGO). The model parameters were estimated from industrial data obtained from a fixed bed reactor operating at an average temperature of 400°C and residence time of 0.3 h. Product distributions were obtained in terms of the weight fraction of various boiling point cuts. The model parameters were estimated using the Nelder-Mead optimization procedure and were correlated with temperature. Comparison of experimental and... 

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to present an improved methodology for design of custom-made hip prostheses, through integration of advanced image processing, computer aided design (CAD) and additive manufacturing (AM) technologies. Design/methodology/approach - The proposed methodology for design of custom-made hip prostheses is based on an independent design criterion for each of the intra-medullary and extra-medullary portions of the prosthesis. The intra-medullar part of the prosthesis is designed using a more accurate and detailed description of the 3D geometry of the femoral intra-medullary cavity, including the septum calcar ridge, so that an improved fill and fit performance... 

In this letter, we propose a method for real-time high density impulse noise suppression from images. In our method, we first apply an impulse detector to identify the corrupted pixels and then employ an innovative weighted-average filter to restore them. The filter takes the nearest neighboring interpolated image as the initial image and computes the weights according to the relative positions of the corrupted and uncorrupted pixels. Experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms the best existing methods in both PSNR measure and visual quality and is quite suitable for real-time applications  

The disposal of used tires is a major environmental problem. With increasing interest on recovery of wastes, pyrolysis is considered as an alternative process for recovering some of the value in scrap tires. An accurate kinetic model is required to predict product yields during thermal or catalytic pyrolysis of scrap tires. Pyrolysis products contain a variety of hydrocarbons over a wide boiling range. A common approach for kinetic modeling of such complex systems is lumping where each lump is defined by a boiling point range. Available experimental data for thermal and catalytic pyrolysis of scrap tires from the literature were used to evaluate two types of lumping models; discrete and... 

Compared with flat linear structures, tubular linear machines do not face edge effects, making their performance better than their flat counterparts. In this article, a novel linear variable-reluctance resolver with tubular configuration is proposed. To optimize the design of an electromagnetic structure, modeling methods are used. Thus, in this article, an analytical model for the proposed resolver is presented. This model is based on the magnetic equivalent circuit (MEC) method and is considerably less time-consuming than finite element analysis (FEA), yet provides accurate results. A conformal mapping is employed to compute the permeance of the air-gap. The proposed model is then utilized... 

In Brukner and Zeilinger's interpretation of quantum mechanics, information is introduced as the most fundamental notion and the finiteness of information is considered as an essential feature of quantum systems. They also define a new measure of information which is inherently different from the Shannon information and try to show that the latter is not useful in defining the information content in a quantum object. Here, we show that there are serious problems in their approach which make their efforts unsatisfactory. The finiteness of information does not explain how objective results appear in experiments and what an instantaneous change in the so-called information vector (or catalog of... 

Low silicon content SAPO-34 was successfully synthesized using the conventional hydrothermal crystallization in the static condition. Effects of different synthesis conditions including crystallization temperature and the silicon source were investigated through X-ray diffraction patterns. It was concluded that the silicon source had a significant effect on silicon incorporation into the alumino-phosphate building blocks in the course of crystallization. Using precipitated silica instead of silica sol resulted in the formation of impurities of alumino-phosphates phases whose crystalline structures collapse at the high temperature of calcination. For the low silicon SAPO-34 synthesis, the... 

Let R be a left Noetherian ring and ZD(R) be the set of all zero-divisors of R. In this paper, it is shown that if RZD(R) is finite, then R is finite  

Numerous methods for direction of arrival (DOA) estimation, used in smart antennas have been already reported in previous studies. The precision of DOA estimation depends on the choice of the algorithm and the geometrical configuration of the antenna array. In this work, the performance of new geometrical configurations, i.e. 2D with equal area and 3D with equal volume including circular, square, triangular, hexagonal and star geometries, with equal number of antenna elements, are examined and compared to each other to find the most proper geometry. Monte-Carlo simulations are performed to evaluate the DOA precision of the proposed arrays using the MUSIC algorithm. It is shown that in three... 

This paper studies detecting matrices in random dense and sparse Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) systems. Detecting matrices were originally introduced in the coin weighing problem. Such matrices can be used in CDMA systems in over-loaded scheme where the number of users is greater than the number of chips. We drive some conditions in the large system limit for binary and bipolar random CDMA systems to ensure that any random matrix is a detecting matrix. Furthermore, we extend our results to sparse random ternary matrices that have been using in the sparse CDMA literature. Finally, a construction method for the sparse detecting matrices is introduced  

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to devise a new approach to synthesize closed-loop feedback guidance law for online thrust- insensitive optimal trajectory generation utilizing neural networks. Design/methodology/approach - The proposed methodology utilizes an open- loop variational formulation that initially determines optimal launch/ ascent trajectories for various scenarios of known uncertainties in the thrust profile of typical solid propellant engines. These open-loop optimized trajectories will then provide the knowledge base needed for the subsequent training of a neural network. The trained network could eventually produce thrust-insensitive closed-loop optimal guidance laws...