Sharif Digital Repository

Sorting of distinct (n, m) chirality species of single-wall carbon nanotubes (SWCNTs) is essential for progress in technical applications in the field of electronic and optic devices. The purpose of this study is to investigate the isolation of single-wall carbon nanotubes based on diameters/chirality in a polymer-salt (polyethylene glycol and sodium citrate) aqueous two-phase system (ATPS) a substitute for common polymer-polymer (polyethylene glycol and dextran) system. The ATPS based on polymer-salt used instead of the common polymer-polymer system due to low viscosity, reduced surface tension, and lower cost of sodium citrate compared to the dextran. For this purpose, the ratio of... 

In this research, direct conversion of wet algal biomass into biodiesel using supercritical methanol was studied. In this process, microalgal lipids simultaneously was extracted and converted to biodiesel under high pressure and temperature conditions without using any catalyst. Several experiments have been performed to optimize the methanol amount and it has been revealed that the best performance was achieved by using methanol/wet biomass ratio of 8:1. The effect of using various co-solvents in increasing the efficiency of the supercritical process was investigated. It has been shown that hexane was the most effective co-solvent and its optimal ratio respect to wet biomass was 6:1. The... 

In this work, an artificial neural network model was used to obtain the partition coefficients of biomolecules in polymer-polymer aqueous two-phase systems. In the artificial neural network, the partition coefficient of a biomolecule depends on the difference between concentrations of poly (ethylene glycol), dextran in the top and bottom phases, temperature and molecular weights of poly (ethylene glycol), dextran, and the biomolecule. The network topology is optimized and the (6-1-1) architecture is found using optimization of an objective function with sequential quadratic programming (SQP) method for 450 experimental data points. The results obtained from the neural network of the... 

In this article, a new hydration model has been proposed to study the phase behavior of aqueous electrolyte solutions. The proposed model distinguishes between an anion and cation in the electrolyte solution. The model has three adjustable parameters which can be obtained using the experimental data of the mean ionic activity coefficients for 113 electrolyte solutions. The results of the proposed model were compared with those of obtained from the Pitzer, the E-NRTL and the E-Wilson models. The results showed that the proposed model can accurately correlate the mean ionic activity coefficients of the aqueous electrolyte solutions than the other models. Also, the proposed model was used in... 

In this study, the recently proposed model by Pazuki et al., based on the local composition concept (LCC), has been used in correlating the vapor-liquid phase behavior of polymer solutions. Similar to the LCC models available in the literature, the proposed model has two combinatorial and residual terms to account for both entropic as well as enthalpic effects in solution. The Flory-Huggins model has been considered as the combinatorial part of the proposed model, while the equation proposed by Pazuki et al. was considered as the residual term. The proposed model has been used in correlating the vapor-liquid phase behavior for a large number of polymer-solvent mixtures at different... 

In this article, a new group contribution model is suggested for obtaining the thermodynamic properties of biomolecules in aqueous solutions. Accordingly, a Freed-FV model has been applied for the combinatorial free-volume term. The activity coefficients, solubilities, densities, and vapor pressures of amino acids and simple peptides in aqueous solutions were correlated, using the proposed group contribution model. Group interaction parameters of the proposed model were obtained by use of experimental data from amino acids available in the literature. The results demonstrate that the group contribution model can accurately correlate activity coefficient, solubility, density, and vapor... 

A new local composition model was used to study the phase behavior of polymer-polymer and polymer-salt aqueous two-phase systems. The proposed model has three terms which account for the combinatorial, the long-range and the short-range effects in solution. The Flory-Huggins and the Debye-Hückel models were used for the combinatorial and long-range contributions. The interaction parameters of the model studied in this work can be regressed using a non-liner regression between the experimental data and those obtained from the proposed model. Also, this model was applied for modeling the partitioning of biomolecules in polymer-polymer and polymer-salt aqueous two-phase systems. The results... 

In this work, the modified Wilson model was used to obtain the activity coefficients of amino acids and simple peptides in non-electrolyte aqueous solutions. The Wilson model was modified using the new local mole fraction proposed by Zhao et al. and non-random case for the reference state. The binary interaction parameters (BIP) of the modified Wilson model for amino acid-water pairs were obtained using the experimental data of the activity coefficients for amino acids available in the literature. The modified Wilson model was also used to correlate the solubility of amino acids in water and the values of Δh/R, Δs/R, and Δg/R of the solutions studied were reported. The results obtained... 

In this research, a new local composition model has been proposed to study the vapor-liquid and liquid-liquid phase equilibria of polyelectrolyte solutions. The proposed model has been used in order to obtain the activity of water in polyethylene glycol (PEG) and polypropylene glycol (PPG) solutions. The interaction parameters introduced into the proposed model have been reported. The interaction parameters between the salt and water molecule have been estimated using the experimental mean ionic activity coefficients of aqueous electrolytes studied in this work. Also, the interaction parameters between the polymer and salt molecule, and the polymer and water molecule have been computed using... 

A simple model is proposed to estimate the critical properties of alkanes-temperature, pressure, and volume. This model is dependent on normal boiling and molecular weight of hydrocarbons. The model has been expanded based on a Taylor series in the form of a polynomial function of normal boiling. Because methane has the simplest structure among hydrocarbons, this model has been calculated around methane. The coefficients of this model were assumed in the form of a linear function of molecular weight. These parameters can be obtained from regression between experimental results and results from this model. By a comparison of this model and previous models, it is shown that this model is... 

In this study, three equations of state (EOS) in conjunction with computational fluid dynamics (CFD) modeling were used to predict the Joule – Thomson (JT) process behavior for natural gas and various pure gases. The JT effect is encountered in several industrial applications. The experimental determination of the JT coefficient (JTC) is complicated, and there is little gas pressure-volume-temperature (PVT) data available for estimating these JTC. Thus, the development of an efficient model to predict the JT effect in industrial processes is necessary. This study was carried out to attain a clear view of the single phase-flow of hydrocarbons and nitrogen in the JT process with CFD modeling.... 

In this study, a novel experimental approach was used to overcome the lack of phase equilibrium information to obtain data that is more applicable to industrial situations. Liquid-liquid equilibrium (LLE) data, tie-lines, and phase boundaries were carried out for two systems of canola oil methyl esters (containing 1 wt % KOH) + glycerol + methanol and sunflower oil methyl esters (containing 1 wt % KOH) + glycerol + methanol at three different temperatures (303.15, 313.15, and 323.15 K). The quality of data was also ascertained using Othmer-Tobias correlations. The experimental LLE data was also correlated by the nonrandom two-liquid (NRTL) and the Wilson-NRF Gibbs free energy models. The... 

In this work, the proposed model by Pazuki et al. based on the Local Composition Concept (LCC), has been used in correlating the vapor-liquid phase behavior of polymer solutions and the liquid-liquid phase behavior of aqueous two-phase systems. The Flory-Huggins model has been used as the combinatorial part of the proposed model, as well as the model proposed by Pazuki et al. was considered as the residual term. The proposed model has been used in correlating the vapor-liquid phase behavior for a number of PEG-Water systems at constant temperature. The results obtained from the proposed model have been compared with those obtained from the Poly-NRTL and the Poly-Wilson models. The results... 

In this work, an expression for the free volume Gibbs energy model based on the local composition concept (LCC) has been proposed in correlating the solubility, the partitioning and the surface tension of β-lactam, tetracycline, fluoroquinolone and chloramphenicol antibiotic groups in water, alcohol, ketone, trihalomethane, ether and ester solvent groups. Similar to the LCC models the proposed model has two combinatorial and residual terms. The extended Guggenheim model is used as combinatorial term and a new local composition-based model, which is the extended local area fraction NRTL-NRF model, is proposed for the residual term. The results obtained from the proposed model have been... 

The natural gas liquid recovery is an important process in a gas plant to correct hydrocarbon dew point and earn profit. In this study, a natural gas liquid recovery unit operated based on the Joule–Thomson process was investigated and its performance was optimized. To improve the system performance, the plant configuration and intermediate pressure ratio were defined as the variables and maximization of the natural gas liquid recovery rate and maximization of exergy efficiency were defined as the objective functions. To improve the plant performance, the amount of natural gas liquid recovery rate should be increased. To achieve this goal, several scenarios for the intermediate pressure... 

A thermodynamic analysis was conducted on the Joule-Thomson (JT) process to improve separation performance and exergy efficiency of a three-stage throttling process in a natural gas liquid (NGL) recovery plant. The JT inversion curve (JTIC) along with the phase envelope diagram (PED) were used to study phase transition during the throttling process. Three different objective functions—maximization of NGL recovery rate, improvement of cooling performance, and minimization of the exergy destruction—were investigated in this study to increase the NGL recovery rate with minimum energy consumption. It was observed that the improvement of cooling performance did not always increase the NGL... 

In this study, six cubic equations of state (CEoSs) were used to predict the Joule-Thomson coefficient (JTC), specific heat capacity (SHC), inversion curve (IC) and outlet temperature of the Joule-Thomson (JT) valve parameters. The accuracy of each CEoS was evaluated from the comparison of experimental data with obtained results. Of the six CEoSs, three-paramter CEoSs— Esmaeilzadeh and Roshanfekr (ER), Harmen and Knapp (HK), and Patel and Teja (PT)— were more accurate than two-paramter equations— Nasrifar and Moshfeghian (NM), Peng-Robinson (PR), and Soave-Redlich-Kwong (SRK). Ironically, original SRK showed the optimum accuracy in estimation of JTC. In addition, the Joule-Thomson inversion... 

In this work, gas dehydration and natural gas liquid (NGL) recovery by the Joule-Thomson (JT) process, were investigated using the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) modeling approach. Droplet behavior inside the separator was analyzed by particle tracing and moisture diffusion methods. The modified separator reduced the water content of natural gas from 0.008 to 0.0029 kg/m3. In addition, the separation efficiency was increased by addition of internal components. One of the added internal components was an inlet deflector. Among different inlet deflectors, the reversed type one exhibited the highest separation efficiency. The separation efficiency improved from 6 to 10% in the original... 

In this study, the effects of several structural and operational parameters affecting the separation efficiency of supersonic separators were investigated by numerical methods. Different turbulence models were used and their accuracies were evaluated. Based on the error analysis, the V2-f turbulence model was more accurate for describing the high swirling turbulent flow than other investigated turbulence models. Therefore, the V2-f turbulence model and particle tracing model were selected to optimize the structure of the convergence part, the diffuser, the drainage port, and the swirler. The cooling performance of three line-type in the convergent section were calculated. The simulation... 

In this study, the liquid-liquid phase behavior of aromatic compound. +. aliphatic compound. +. ionic liquid (IL) ternary systems was estimated by using two artificial neural networks (ANN) developed based on back propagation (BP) and hybrid group method of data handling (GMDH). Molar ratio of aliphatic compound, aromatic compound, and IL as well as temperature, molecular weight ratio of aliphatic compound to IL, and molecular weight ratio of aromatic compound to IL were chosen as the inputs to the networks. Additionally, the mole fraction of components in final alkane-rich phase and IL-rich phase was considered as desired outputs. The best topology of the BP-ANN model was found as (6-8-4)....