Sharif Digital Repository

Membrane separator based on the polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF) is prepared via the non-solvent-induced phase separation (NIPS) method with water and ethanol as non-solvent and a mixture of dimethylformamide (DMF) and acetone as solvent. The effect of various acetone/DMF ratios and non-solvent material on the physical and electrochemical properties of the separator is studied by FE-SEM, tensile strength, electrochemical AC-impedance spectroscopy (EIS), thermal stability, and linear sweep voltammetry (LSV). The charge-discharge studies are carried out by fabricating a lithium foil/polymer electrolyte membrane/LiFePO4 cell. The results show that with the change of solvent and non-solvent, the... 

In the absence of powerful rigorous models, in this research a simple but practical method for calculating the temperature and residence time and carbon black yield in oil-furnace reactors is proposed. For this purpose an empirical formula of the form CXHY is assumed for the carbon black feedstock based on typical feedstock used in this industry. Based on the prevailing reactor conditions, thermodynamic considerations and available outlet tail gas from the reactor, a few representative reactions are considered to describe the entire reaction network. These include complete combustion for the fuel and, incomplete combustion and pyrolysis for the feedstock. Carbon black yield can be estimated... 

A novel sulfoxide containing bis(ether amine) monomer, 2,2'-sulfoxide- bis[4-methyl(2-trifluoromethyl)4-aminophenoxy) phenyl ether] (M2), was synthesized from the halogen displacement of 2-chloro-5-nitrobenzotrifluoride with dibenzosulfoxide (DH) in the presence of potassium carbonate, followed by catalytic reduction of bis(ether nitro) intermediate with Zinc/Ammonium chloride. A series of organic-soluble poly(ether amide)s (PA1-7) bearing sulfoxide and electronwithdrawing trifiuoromethyl group were synthesized from bis(ether amine) with various aromatic diacids (1-7) via a direct polycondensation with triphenyl phosphite and pyridine. The resulting polymers had inherent viscosities ranging... 

This paper is aimed at investigating some computational aspects of different isoperimetric problems on weighted trees. In this regard, we consider different connectivity parameters called minimum normalized cuts/isoperimetric numbers defined through taking the minimum of the maximum or the mean of the normalized outgoing flows from a set of subdomains of vertices, where these subdomains constitute a partition/subpartition. We show that the decision problem for the case of taking k-partitions and the maximum (called the max normalized cut problem NCP^M), and the other two decision problems for the mean version (referred to as IPP^m and NCP^m) are NP-complete problems for weighted trees. On... 

The purpose of this study is to predict the activation barriers and enthalpy for elementary steps in the process of Fischer-Tropsch (F-T) on the surfaces of Fe(110), Cu(111) and Fe/Cu alloys catalyst using "Unity Bond Index-Quadratic Exponential Potential" method aimed at predicting the activity and selectivity on the basis of energy criteria. The elementary steps, such as dissociation of CO, hydrogenation of carbidic carbon, C-C chain growth by insertion of CH2 versus CO into the metal-alkyl bonds, and chain termination, which lead to hydrocarbons (alkanes versus α-olefins) or oxygenates are discussed in detail. The results show that metallic Fe(110) is necessary to produce the carbidic... 

Given a graph, the sparsest cut problem asks for a subset of vertices whose edge expansion (the normalized cut given by the subset) is minimized. In this paper, we study a generalization of this problem seeking for k disjoint subsets of vertices (clusters) whose edge expansions are small and furthermore, the number of vertices that remained in the exterior of the subsets (outliers) is also small. It is proved in Daneshgar et al. (2012) that this problem is NP-hard for trees. Here, we prove that it can be solved in polynomial time for all weighted trees, provided that the search space is restricted to subsets inducing connected subgraphs. The additional constraint has justifications in... 

A heterogeneous magnetic copper catalyst was prepared via anchoring of copper sulfate onto multi-layered poly(2-dimethylaminoethyl acrylamide)-coated magnetic nanoparticles and was characterized using various techniques. The catalyst was found to be active, effective and selective for one-pot three-component reaction of alkyl halide, sodium azide and alkyne, known as copper-catalyzed click synthesis of 1,2,3-triazoles. As little as 0.3 mol% of catalyst was found to be effective under the optimum conditions. The catalyst could also be recycled and reused up to seven times without significant loss of activity. Thermal stability, high loading level of copper on catalyst, broad diversity of... 

This paper deals with the dynamics of rising bubbles attached to a vertical wall under different wettability conditions. Even though, bubbles rising freely in a liquid have extensively been studied, bubbles attached to a wall have not been fully understood. Therefore, in this work, rising bubbles attached to a vertical wall were numerically investigated by applying the ALE method along with adaptive mesh refinement schemes to properly resolve the bubble interface and its deformation. To consider wall wettability effects, different contact angles of 45° 90° and 105° were considered along with the case of freely rising bubbles. The problem was carried out at different Bond numbers of 0.27,... 

A well performance film cooling implies for a high cooling effectives accompanied with a wide cooling coverage. During the past six decades, film cooling effectiveness has been well defined with a specific relation to quantify it. However, despite of numerous film cooling research, there is not an explicit method to quantify the uniformity of a coolant film spread over the hot surfaces. This work introduces a cooling uniformity coefficient (CUC) to evaluate how well a coolant film spreads over a surface being cooled. Four different cases are computationally studied. In the three cases, a single jet is injected into a hot cross flow with different jet exit shapes (i.e. square, spanwise... 

Surface tension driven passive micro-pumping relies mainly on the surface tension properties. To have control over surface tension driven passive micro-pumps (STD-PMPs), it is essential to understand the physical background of the fluid flow in these pumps. Hence, the purpose of this work is to give an exploration of the flow physics of a STD-PMP. In this regard, computer simulation is used to give detailed information about the flow pattern and physical phenomena at different conditions. To this end, a droplet of water, with a specified diameter, is placed onto an entry port connected to another droplet at the exit port via a microchannel. The results indicate that the pumping process, in... 

The behavior of an electrified liquid jet breakup and modes of disintegration were investigated at different flow rates and voltages. The current phenomenology belongs to a new injector introduced recently by Morad et al. (2016). This injector has proven to highly extend the stability and flow rate of electrospray particularly in the Taylor cone-jet mode. The experimental investigation was performed using a high-power light-emitting diode (LED) illumination as the light source. The light source was developed to operate in the pulsing condition when synchronized with a digital camera and was particularly designed to function properly in the presence of high electromagnetic interference (EMI).... 

The mathematical formulation for material growth and remodeling processes in finite deformation is developed based on the couple stress theory. The generalized continuum mechanics of couple stress theory is capable of capturing small-scale cellular effects and of modeling mass flux in these processes. The frame-indifferent balance equations of mass, linear and angular momentums, as well as internal energy together with the entropy inequality are first introduced in the presence of the mass flux based on the finite couple-stress theory. Then, within the framework of material uniformity the Eshelby and Mandel stress tensors as driving or configurational forces for local rearrangement of the... 

Fog computing is essentially the expansion of cloud computing towards the network edge, reducing user access time to computing resources and services. Various advantages attribute to fog computing, including reduced latency, and improved user experience. However, user mobility may limit the benefits of fog computing. The displacement of users from one location to another, may increase their distance from a fog server, leading into latency amplification. This would also increase the probability of over utilization of fog servers which are located in popular destinations of mobile edge devices. This creates an unbalanced network of fog devices failing to provide lower makespan and fewer cloud... 

Let LL be a reversible Markovian generator on a finite set View the MathML sourceV. Relations between the spectral decomposition of LL and subpartitions of the state space View the MathML sourceV into a given number of components which are optimal with respect to min–max or max–min Dirichlet connectivity criteria are investigated. Links are made with higher-order Cheeger inequalities and with a generic characterization of subpartitions given by the nodal domains of an eigenfunction. These considerations are applied to generators whose positive rates are supported by the edges of a discrete cycle ZNZN, to obtain a full description of their spectra and of the shapes of their eigenfunctions, as... 

In this paper1 we consider higher isoperimetric numbers of a (finite directed) graph. In this regard we focus on the nth mean isoperimetric constant of a directed graph as the minimum of the mean outgoing normalized flows from a given set of n disjoint subsets of the vertex set of the graph. We show that the second mean isoperimetric constant in this general setting, coincides with (the mean version of) the classical Cheeger constant of the graph, while for the rest of the spectrum we show that there is a fundamental difference between the nth isoperimetric constant and the number obtained by taking the minimum over all n-partitions. In this direction, we show that our definition is the... 

This paper discusses the optimal deployment of a cluster consisting of connected AC-coupled, low voltage (48 V) multi-carrier microgrids within an integrated framework. The utilization of this integrated framework proves to be an effective approach for enhancing the reliability, resiliency, and operational quality of the clustered multi-carrier microgrids. Furthermore, it enables improved utilization of distributed energy resources in both grid-connected and stand-alone scenarios. In order to address local objectives, this paper presents a hybrid approach to determine the optimal integration and size of distributed energy resources in autonomous multi-carrier microgrids. Additionally, the... 

Context-awareness is an essential requirement of modern access control models. Organization-Based Access Control (OrBAC) model is a powerful context-aware access control model defined by first-order logic. However, due to the monotonicity nature of the first-order logic, OrBAC suffers from the incapability of making decision based on incomplete context information as well as the definition of default and exception policy rules. This paper proposes augmenting non-monotonicity features to OrBAC using MKNF+ logic, which is a combination of Description Logic (DL) and Answer Set Programming (ASP). Along with the use of DL to define ontology for main entities and context information in OrBAC;... 

This paper illustrates the use of a combined neural network model for classification of electrocardiogram (ECG) beats. We present a trainable neural network ensemble approach to develop customized electrocardiogram beat classifier in an effort to further improve the performance of ECG processing and to offer individualized health care. We process a three stage technique for detection of premature ventricular contraction (PVC) from normal beats and other heart diseases. This method includes a denoising, a feature extraction and a classification. At first we investigate the application of stationary wavelet transform (SWT) for noise reduction of the electrocardiogram (ECG) signals. Then... 

Integrated transmission expansion planning (TEP) and generation expansion planning (GEP) with Wind Farms (WFs) is addressed in this paper. The optimal number of expanded lines, the optimal capacity of WFs installed capacity, and the optimal capacity of wind farms lines (WFLs) are determined through a new TEP optimization model. Furthermore, the optimum capacity additions including conventional generating units is obtained in the proposed model. The Benders decomposition approach is used for solving the optimization problem, including a master problem and two sub-problems with internal scenario analysis. In order to reduce the computational burden of the multi-year and multi-objective... 

This paper introduces a new idea of controlling cavitation around a hydrofoil through a passive cavitation controller called artificial cavitation bubble generator (ACG). Cyclic processes, namely, growth and implosion of bubbles around an immersed body, are the main reasons for the destruction and erosion of the said body. This paper aims to create a condition in which the cavitation bubbles reach a steady-state situation and prevent the occurrence of the cyclic processes. For this purpose, the ACG is placed on the surface of an immersed body, in particular, the suction surface of a 2D hydrofoil. A simulation was performed with an implicit finite volume scheme based on a SIMPLE algorithm...