Sharif Digital Repository

In the current study, niosome-encapsulated tobramycin based on Span 60 and Tween 60 was synthesized and its biological efficacies including anti-bacterial, anti-efflux, and anti-biofilm activities were investigated against multidrug resistant (MDR) clinical strains of Pseudomonas aeruginosa. The niosomal formulations were characterized using scanning electron microscopy, transmission electron microscopy, and dynamic light scattering measurement. The encapsulation efficiency was found to be 69.54% ±; 0.67. The prepared niosomal formulations had a high storage stability to 60 days with small changes in size and drug entrapment, which indicates that it is a suitable candidate for pharmaceutical... 

In the current study, niosome-encapsulated tobramycin based on Span 60 and Tween 60 was synthesized and its biological efficacies including anti-bacterial, anti-efflux, and anti-biofilm activities were investigated against multidrug resistant (MDR) clinical strains of Pseudomonas aeruginosa. The niosomal formulations were characterized using scanning electron microscopy, transmission electron microscopy, and dynamic light scattering measurement. The encapsulation efficiency was found to be 69.54% ±; 0.67. The prepared niosomal formulations had a high storage stability to 60 days with small changes in size and drug entrapment, which indicates that it is a suitable candidate for pharmaceutical... 

In the present study, an experimental platform is developed to study the behavior of the injected jet in a gas cross-flow applicable to different categories of fluid mechanics such as combustion. In all tests, water and air are used as jet and cross-flow gas, respectively. The main target of this work is to cover the higher range of momentum ratios and Weber numbers for the presentation of a more accurate equation for jet trajectory. To achieve a desirable scale of experiments, the range of momentum ratio is considered from 5 to 211 and the Weber number of gasses in all tests is between 1.1–19.1. For data mining and measurements, the shadowgraph method is used. It is shown that by increasing... 

In this study the ability of artificial neural network (ANN) in forecasting the daily NASDAQ stock exchange rate was investigated. Several feed forward ANNs that were trained by the back propagation algorithm have been assessed. The methodology used in this study considered the short-term historical stock prices as well as the day of week as inputs. Daily stock exchange rates of NASDAQ from January 28, 2015 to 18 June, 2015 are used to develop a robust model. First 70 days (January 28 to March 7) are selected as training dataset and the last 29 days are used for testing the model prediction ability. Networks for NASDAQ index prediction for two type of input dataset (four prior days and nine... 

A rapid and sensitive HPLC method has been developed for the quantification of mirtazapine (MRZ), a noradrenergic and specific serotonergic inhibitor antidepressant (NaSSA) and its two major metabolites N-desmethyl mirtazapine (NDM) and 8-hydroxymirtazapine (8-OHM) in human plasma. The separation was achieved using Chromolith C18 column and a mobile phase of acetonitrile: phosphate buffer (pH = 3, 20:80, v/v) in isocratic mode at a flow rate of 2 mL/min. A fluorescence detector was set at 290 and 350 nm for excitation and emission, respectively. Zolpidem was used as the internal standard. Liquid-liquid extraction was applied for sample clean up. All analytes were eluted in less than 5... 

Pentamodes (first conceived theoretically by Milton and Cherkaev) are a very interesting class of mechanical metamaterials that can be used as building blocks of structures withdecoupled bulk and shear moduli. The pentamodes usually are composed of double cone-shaped struts with the middle diameter being large and the end diameters being tiny (ideally approaching zero). The cubic diamond geometry was proposed by Milton and Cherkaev as a suitable geometry for the unit cell and has since been used in the majority of the works on pentamodes. In this work, we aim to evaluate the degree to which the base unit cell design contributes to high bulk to shear modulus ratio, also known as Figure Of... 

This paper introduces a straightforward technique for parameters estimation of the RC equivalent circuit model of a battery cell with the main aim of its implementation in real-time digital simulator frameworks. The RC model parameters are precisely estimated by the analysis of the battery cell voltage curve during relaxation time using the pulse current test. In this regard, Least-squares fitting is used to mitigate the error of the battery cell voltage response, which leads to a precise estimation of the RC model parameters as a function of the state-of-charge. Exponential and Gaussian functions are utilized to define the resistances and the capacitances in the RC model respectively based... 

Pentamode metamaterials are a type of extremal designer metamaterials, which are able to demonstrate extremely high rigidity in one direction and extremely high compliance in other directions. Pentamodes can, therefore, be considered as building blocks of exotic materials with any arbitrarily selected thermodynamically admissible elasticity tensor. The pentamode lattices can then be envisioned to be combined to construct intermediate extremal materials, such as quadramodes, trimodes, and bimodes. In this study, we constructed several primary types of anisotropic pentamode lattices (with midpoint positioning of 10%, 15%, 20%, 25%, 30%, 35%, and 42% of the main unit cell diagonal) and then... 

A framework to calculate a quantitative measure of seismic resilience using the Endurance Time (ET) method is introduced. ET method is a response-history based analysis procedure where structures are subjected to gradually intensifying dynamic excitations and their performance is assessed based on their response at different excitation levels, reducing the required computational effort. First, a prototype hospital building is optimally designed through three distinct design philosophies: prescriptive design code, performance based design criteria, and value based seismic design method. In value based design method, the design sections of structural elements are assumed as optimization... 

An assessment study of two different shunt FACTS devices for compensating disturbances due to voltage variation in power systems is presented in this paper. Namely, Static Compensator (STATCOM) and Static Var Compensator (SVC) are Considered in this study. Eigen Value analysis and nonlinear time domain simulations for starting motor, motor in load varying state and short circuit on motor terminals show that STATCOM DC Voltage regulation has a better performance Compared to that of SVC. The result that will be presented in the paper will prove the superiorly of STATCOM over SVC in increasing motor speeding up and improving system voltage profile particularly at starting. © 2005 IEEE  

The steady 2-D boundary layer flow over a flat plate is studied analytically by homotopy perturbation method to analyze the entropy generation inside the boundary layer with constant wall temperature. By the transformations of go-verning equations including continuity, momentum, and energy by similarity va-riables, a dimensionless equation for entropy generation inside the boundary layer is obtained. The effects of important parameters such as Reynolds and Eck-ert numbers are investigated and the physical interpretations of the results are explained in details  

Analysis of an extensive air shower (EAS) detected by surface arrays highly depends on the determination of core locations. Here we present a new method to find the core location of an EAS that, unlike the common methods, does not depend on the lateral distribution function and uses arrival times of secondary particles. This method improves the accuracy of finding the core location of a low-energy EAS in the internal parts of an array, in comparison with common methods  

The most important goal of studying an extensive air shower is to find the energy, mass and arrival direction of its primary cosmic ray. In order to find these parameters, the core position and arrival direction of the shower should be determined. In this paper, a new method for finding core location has been introduced that utilizes trigger time information of particle detectors. We have also developed a simple technique to reconstruct the arrival direction. Our method is not based upon density-sensitive detectors which are sensitive to the number of crossing particles and is also independent of lateral distribution models. This model has been developed and examined by the analysis of... 

The unique properties of modified Hermite pulses is utilized to develop a novel pulse technique for Ultra Wideband (UWB) communications. The proposed method increases the bandwidth of the pulse up to 10 GHz and overcomes the coexistence problem of UWB and vulnerable narrowband systems through suppressing narrowband interference. Consequently it improves the range of UWB communications by increasing the power, without disturbing the narrowband systems. The pulse technique is implemented in high frequency pulse generation circuits and could be fully integrated in BiCMOS process. The nulls of the frequency response are tuned to be located in a definite narrowband system with the number of the... 

Clay liners are widely used as porous membrane barriers to control solute transport and to prevent the leakage of leachate both in horizontal and vertical flow scenarios, such as the isolated base and ramps of sanitary landfills. Despite the primary importance of saturated hydraulic conductivity in a reliable simulation of fluid flow through clay barriers, there is no model to predict hydraulic conductivity of clayey soils permeated with saline aqueous solutions because most of the current models were developed for pure water. Therefore, the main motivation behind this study is to derive semi-empirical models for simulating the hydraulic conductivity of clayey soils in the presence of... 

As a primary step of establishment of an extensive air shower array consisting 20 scintillation detectors we optimized an individual detector. Square shaped scintillators are placed under a metal pyramid Light Enclosure with a photomultiplier tube (PMT) at the vertex of it. A set of experiments are performed to optimize the height of light enclosures by comparing 4 different heights 0.1, 0.2, 0.3 and 0.4 m. These experiments are supported by a Monte Carlo simulation of detection process. In this article, by considering experimental and simulation results we concluded that 20 cm is an optimum height for light enclosures  

This paper presents an evaluation of two distinct techniques to improve energy absorption capability of an accordion cellular structure with close-to-zero Poisson's ratio. For this purpose, fiber-reinforcement and foam-filling methods were employed to address the material enhancement and to obtain light and tough structures with high specific energy absorption. Employing an innovated additive manufacturing based on material extrusion process, specimens of glass fiber-reinforced PLA were produced in both in-plane directions to compare with the un-reinforced counterpart. In continue, some of the 3D printed samples were strengthened by means of polyurethane foam in their hollow structure. The... 

Given integers t, k, and v such that 0 ≤ t ≤ k ≤ v, let Wt k (v) be the inclusion matrix of t-subsets vs. k-subsets of a v-set. We modify slightly the concept of standard tableau to study the notion of rank of a finite set of positive integers which was introduced by Frankl. Utilizing this, a decomposition of the poset 2[v] into symmetric skipless chains is given. Based on this decomposition, we construct an inclusion matrix, denoted by Wover(t, -) k (v), which is row-equivalent to Wt k (v). Its Smith normal form is determined. As applications, Wilson's diagonal form of Wt k (v) is obtained as well as a new proof of the well-known theorem on the necessary and sufficient conditions for... 

A computational tool is developed to capture the interaction of solid object with two-phase flow. The full two-dimensional Navier–Stokes equations are solved on a regular structured grid to resolve the flow field. The level set and the immersed boundary methods are used to capture the free surface of a fluid and a solid object, respectively. A two-step projection method along with Multi-Processing (OpenMP) is employed to solve the flow equations. The computational tool is verified based on numerical and experimental data with three scenarios: a cylinder falling into a rectangular domain due to gravity, transient vertical oscillation of a cylinder by releasing above its equilibrium position,...