Sharif Digital Repository

A sonochemistry-based synthesis method was used to produce nanocrystalline nickel oxide powder with ∼20 nm average crystallite diameter from Ni(OH)2 precursor. Ultrasound waves were applied to the primary solution to intensify the Ni(OH)2 precipitation. Dried precipitates were calcined at 320 °C to form nanocrystalline NiO particles. The morphology of the produced powder was characterized by transmission electron microscopy. Using sonochemical waves resulted in lowering of the size of the nickel oxide crystallites. FT-IR spectroscopy and X-ray diffraction revealed high purity well-crystallized structure of the synthesized powder. Photoluminescence spectroscopy confirmed production of a wide... 

In this study, a general methodology has been developed to design the proper bearing in order to eliminate the curvature of the final product in extrusion process. Three smooth curved (advanced-surface) dies with non-symmetric T-shaped sections and different off-centricities have been studied. For each die, the proper bearing has been designed and physical and numerical modeling have been performed to validate the design. The design procedure is as follows: A formulation, based on Bezier curves, has been used to determine the exit velocity profile. Since the result of Bezier method is different from the actual velocity profile, the Chitkara corrective function has been modified and applied... 

Discriminative subspace analysis is a popular approach for a variety of applications. There is a growing interest in subspace learning techniques for face recognition. Principal component analysis (PCA) and eigenfaces are two important subspace analysis methods have been widely applied in a variety of areas. However, the excessive dimension of data space often causes the curse of dimensionality dilemma, expensive computational cost, and sometimes the singularity problem. In this paper, a new supervised discriminative subspace analysis is presented by encoding face image as a high order general tensor. As face space can be considered as a nonlinear submanifold embedded in the tensor space, a... 

Cephalometric analysis has an important role in diagnosis and treatment of dental disharmonies. In this paper, we propose an efficient, fast, and automatic method to localize cephalometric landmarks on digitized x-ray images. The proposed algorithm uses the information of the marked landmarks on a reference normal cephalometry image as the prior knowledge. In the first step of the proposed method, the image is automatically divided into several regions and three main control points are located on it. These are then matched to their corresponding points on the reference image to form an affine transform matrix that describes how other points on the reference image should be mapped to the... 

Purpose: This paper aims to improve the manufacturability of additive manufacturing (AM) for topology-optimized (TO) structures. Enhancement of manufacturability focuses on modifying geometric constraints and classifying the building orientation (BO) of AM parts to reduce stresses and support structures (SSs). To this end, artificial intelligence (AI) networks are being developed to automate design for additive manufacturing (DfAM). Design/methodology/approach: This study considers three geometric constraints for their correction by convolutional autoencoders (CAEs) and transfer learning (TL). Furthermore, BOs of AM parts are classified using generative adversarial (GAN) and classification... 

Phase morphology, state of compatibility and various properties of blends of polycarbonate (PC) with bottle-grade and fibre-grade polyethylene terephthalate (BPET and FPET, respectively) were investigated. It was found that these blends have two-phase separated morphology with partial miscibility. Scanning electron micrographs revealed separated domains of PC-rich and PET-rich zones. PC domains appear spherical increasing in size from 2 μm for PC20/FPET80 up to about 5 μm for PC60/FPET40 blend. Further increase in PC content up to 80% caused phase inversion in which FPET appears as finely dispersed domains in continuous PC matrix. Tg of PC-rich phase decreased from 153 deg;C for pure PC down... 

In the image segmentation field, traditional techniques do not completely meet the segmentation challenges mostly posed by inherently fuzzy images. Fuzzy connectedness and fuzzy clustering are considered as two well-known techniques for introducing fuzzy concepts to the problem of image segmentation. Fuzzy connectedness-based Segmentation methods consider spatial relation of image pixels by "hanging togetherness" a notion based on intensity homogeneity. But, they do not inherently utilize feature information of image pixels. On the other hand, as the segmentation domain of fuzzy clustering-based methods is the feature space they do not consider spatial relations among image pixels. Recently,... 

Machine-learning based human posture-prediction tools can potentially be robust alternatives to motion capture measurements. Existing posture-prediction approaches are confined to two-handed load-handling activities performed at heights below 120 cm from the floor and to predicting a limited number of body-joint coordinates/angles. Moreover, the extrapolating power of these tools beyond the range of the input dataset they were trained for (e.g., for underweight, overweight, or left-handed individuals) has not been investigated. In this study, we trained/validated/tested two posture-prediction (for full-body joint coordinates and angles) artificial neural networks (ANNs) using both... 

In this study a membrane biological reactor (MBR) was operated at 25±1 °C and pH = 7.5±0.5 to treat synthetic wastewater containing high phenol concentrations. Removal efficiencies of phenol and chemical oxygen demand (COD)were evaluated at four various hydraulic retention times (HRTs) of 24, 12, 8, and 4 hours. The removal rate of phenol (5.51 kg-Phenol kg-VSS-1 d-1), observed at HRT of 4 h,was the highest phenol degradation rate in the literature.According toCODtests, therewere no significant organic matter in the effluent, and phenol was degraded completely by mixed culture. Substrate inhibition was calculated from experimental growth parameters using the Haldane, Yano, and Edward... 

This paper presents a new method for the design of variable fractional delay (VFD) FIR digital filters using Genetic Algorithm (GA). Each sub-filter of Farrow structure is designed individually with defined accuracy and bandwidth. A variable mutation probability is also employed, which improves the accuracy of the solution. Compared with existing methods, it reduces the computational complexity and enhances the design flexibility. Furthermore, a simple GA is used to compute the filter coefficients in canonic singed digit (CSD) representations. Since this algorithm selects the initial population in CSD representation and searches for the digits between [-1 1], most of the digits become zero.... 

The main goal of this study is to investigate the role of vascular graft thickness in wall stress gradient in anastomosis region. Atherosclerosis is a common heart disease causes high mortality rates every year. The gold standard treatment of atherosclerosis is replacing with autologous vein extracted from patient's body. Since proper autologous vein is limited, researchers have made efforts to achieve compliance engineered blood vessels. Mechanical stress has great effect on both smooth muscle cells and endothelial cells and it is considered as a stimulus in plaque formation. In this study, we evaluate the role of thickness in wall stress of anastomosis region. For this purpose, two... 

The main goal of this study is to investigate the role of vascular graft thickness in wall stress gradient in anastomosis region. Atherosclerosis is a common heart disease causes high mortality rates every year. The gold standard treatment of atherosclerosis is replacing with autologous vein extracted from patient's body. Since proper autologous vein is limited, researchers have made efforts to achieve compliance engineered blood vessels. Mechanical stress has great effect on both smooth muscle cells and endothelial cells and it is considered as a stimulus in plaque formation. In this study, we evaluate the role of thickness in wall stress of anastomosis region. For this purpose, two... 

Previous in-vivo investigations on the stabilizing efficacy of knee bracing for ACL reconstructed patients have been often limited to 20-30 degrees of knee flexion. In this study, the effectiveness of a uniaxial hinged functional brace to improve the knee stability was assessed at 30, 60 and 90 degrees of knee flexion. Arthrometry tests were conducted on 15 healthy subjects before and following wearing the brace and the tibial displacements were measured at up to 150 N anterior forces. Results indicated that functional bracing has a significant stabilizing effect throughout the range of knee flexion examined (p < 0.05). The rate of effectiveness, however, was not consistent across the... 

Quality of Experience (QoE) measures the overall quality of a service from users’ point of view by considering several system, human, and contextual factors. There exist various objective and subjective methods for QoE prediction. Although the subjective approach is more expensive and challenging than the objective approach, QoE’s level can be more accurately determined by a subjective test. This paper investigates various features affecting QoE by proposing a comprehensive subjective evaluation. First, we show that many unconsidered factors can significantly affect QoE. We have generated voice samples featuring different values for novel factors related to the speaker, signal, and network.... 

We theoretically investigate the magnetoelastic coupling (MEC) and its effect on magnon transport in two-dimensional antiferromagnets with a honeycomb lattice. MEC coefficients along with magnetic exchange parameters and spring constants are computed for monolayers of transition-metal trichalcogenides with Néel magnetic order (MnPS3 and VPS3) and zigzag order (CrSiTe3, NiPS3, and NiPSe3) by ab initio calculations. Using these parameters, we predict that the spin-Nernst coefficient is significantly enhanced due to magnetoelastic coupling. Our study shows that although Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction can produce spin-Nernst effect in these materials, other mechanisms such as magnon-phonon... 

Interfacial tension is one of the very important parameters in pharmacology science, chemical engineering and petroleum engineering. The interfacial tension between pure hydrocarbons and water is widely used in chemical and petroleum engineering and so that it is highly desirable to find its accurate values. In this study a new unique correlation has been developed based on a comprehensive database of pure hydrocarbons-water interfacial tension values which contained both aliphatic and aromatic compounds (32 different hydrocarbons) with pressure ranges of 0.1-300 MPa and temperature ranges of 252.44-550 K. The proposed correlation uses the density difference between pure hydrocarbon and... 

In the current study, gold nanoparticles (AuNPs) were prepared using the green synthesis method using Artemisia annua extract, loaded into niosomes, and investigated their cytotoxicity and apoptotic effects. To optimize the niosomal formulation containing AuNPs, the effects of surfactants: cholesterol molar ratio, Span 60: Tween 60 M ratio, and AuNP concentration (µg/mL) were investigated. After examining the drug release profile, mathematical models were assessed to predict release kinetic. The cytotoxicity of noisome encapsulated AuNPs and free AuNPs was evaluated against human ovarian cancer cell line (A2780) by MTT assay. The apoptotic/necrosis ratio was studied using flow cytometry as... 

Conductive self -electrical stimuli bioactive scaffolds could be used the potential for peripheral nerve regeneration with the maximum efficiency. To produce such conductive self-electrical stimuli bioactive scaffolds, chopped spun piezoelectric nanofibers of polyvinylidene fluoride/mesoporous silica nanoparticle (PVDF/MCM41) are prepared and incorporated in gellan/polyaniline/graphene (gellan/PAG) nanocomposites which have been previously prepared by incorporation of polyaniline/graphene (PAG) nanoparticles in gellan gel at 80 °C. Highly conductive binary doped polyaniline/graphene nanoparticles are prepared by chemical oxidative polymerization of aniline monomer using in-suite...