Sharif Digital Repository

Design for Human Safety (DfHS) is an approach to integrate knowledge of human safety in the design process. DfHS is multi-disciplinary in its nature, requiring many kinds of information and knowledge. Number of DfHS studies tried to apply Axiomatic Design (AD) to achieve their aims. The purpose of this paper is to review the literature on application of AD in DfHS in manufacturing systems and to propose a roadmap for future DfHS works. This paper examines the number and type of publications dealing with this context. The review covers papers published between 1990 (when AD was introduced first) and 2017. It is based on a range of combinations of the following keywords: "Axiomatic design" and... 

Several lattice Boltzmann models for multi-phase flow have been developed, but few of them are capable of modeling fluid flows with high density ratio in the order of 1000. Therefore, an advanced chromodynamics, Rothmann-Keller (RK) type model is employed in current study, which can handle liquid-gas density ratio in the order of 1000 and viscosity ratio in the order of 100. Other distinctive characteristics of the proposed model are high stability, and capability of setting parameters such as surface tension independently. In spite of these benefits, the original RK model fails to model wetting tendency of the fluids. As a result, it is impossible to correctly simulate two-fluid phase flow... 

In this study, the kinetics of aging in AA6061 and AA6061 with 5% volume fraction SiCp were studied and compared. The composite was first produced and homogenized using stir casting technique followed by hot extrusion with the ratio of 18:1. Then, both AA6061 and the composite were aged at three different temperatures including room temperature, 170 °C and 240 °C, while mechanical properties during aging were evaluated employing hardness measurements and tensile testing. Moreover, in order to assess the effect of plastic deformation on the kinetics of aging, a series of samples were first deformed by equal-channel angular pressing immediately after solution treatment and then aged in the... 

Infinite series solutions are obtained for electrical potential, electroosmotic velocity, ionic conductance, and surface physicochemical properties of long pH-regulated rectangular nanochannels of low surface potential utilizing the double finite Fourier transform method. Closed form expressions are also obtained for channels of large height to width ratio for which the depthwise variations vanish. Neglecting the Stern layer impact, the effects of EDL (Electric Double Layer) overlap, multiple ionic species, and association/dissociation reactions on the surface are all taken into account. Moreover, finite-element-based numerical simulations are conducted to account for the end effects as well... 

During preliminary investigation phase of the national Chabahar-Zahedan railway line, serious geotechnical problems including non-uniform settlements, tensile cracks, and local collapse were reported in parts of the path near the coastline. A follow-up field investigation revealed that the in-situ soil at construction site has a metastable structure being sensitive to saturation and loading. Therefore, a comprehensive series of physical, chemical, electro-chemical, and geotechnical tests were conducted to classify and characterize the soil properties and behavior in its natural state. The natural soil was classified as a clayey loess with moderately dispersive to dispersive characteristics.... 

Semi-analytical solutions are obtained for the electrical potential, electroosmotic velocity, ionic conductance, and surface physicochemical properties associated with long pH-regulated nanochannels of arbitrary but constant cross-sectional area. The effects of electric double layer overlap, multiple ionic species, and surface association/dissociation reactions are all taken into account, assuming low surface potentials. The method of analysis includes series solutions which the pertinent coefficients are obtained by applying the wall boundary conditions using either of the least-squares or point matching techniques. Although the procedure is general enough to be applied to almost any... 

The dispersion of a neutral solute band by electrokinetic flow in polyelectrolyte layer (PEL)-grafted rectangular/slit microchannels is theoretically studied. The flow is assumed to be both steady and fully developed and a first-order irreversible reaction is considered at the wall to account for probable surface adsorption of solutes. Considering low electric potentials, analytical solutions are obtained for electric potential, fluid velocity and solute concentration. Special solutions are also obtained for the case without wall adsorption. To track the dispersion properties of the solute band, the generalized dispersion model is adopted by considering the exchange, the convection and the... 

A new type of collapsible soil was encountered in Southern Iran and caused some serious technical problems including subsidence, collapse and sinkholes during the construction of Zahedan-Chabahar railway. Field observations indicated that in-situ soil contains excessive amount of salts resulting in dispersive features in response to seepage forces in addition to its collapsibility. Therefore, a systematic research plan including field sampling and laboratory testing was carried out to investigate the observed geotechnical features. Results of physio-chemical tests revealed the dominance of Sodium in excess of 70% relative to total dissolved salts, which results in high dispersive potential.... 

We present the notion of reasonable utility for binary mechanisms, which applies to all utility functions in the literature. This notion induces a partial ordering on the performance of all binary differentially private (DP) mechanisms. DP mechanisms that are maximal elements of this ordering are optimal DP mechanisms for every reasonable utility. By looking at differential privacy as a randomized graph coloring, we characterize these optimal DP in terms of their behavior on a certain subset of the boundary datasets we call a boundary hitting set. In the process of establishing our results, we also introduce a useful notion that generalizes DP conditions for binary-valued queries, which we... 

The polysaccharide, kappa-carrageenan (κC) was chemically modified to achieve a novel superabsorbent hydrogel via graft copolymerization of methacrylamide (MAM) onto the substrate followed by alkaline hydrolysis. Ammonium persulfate (APS) and N,N′-methylene bisacrylamide (MBA) were used as a free-radical initiator and a crosslinker, respectively. The saponification reaction was carried out using sodium hydroxide aqueous solution. Either κC-g-PMAM or hydrolyzed κC-g-PMAM (PMAM: polymethacrylamide) was characterized by FT-IR spectroscopy. The effect of grafting variables (i.e. concentration of MBA, MAM, and APS) and alkaline hydrolysis conditions (i.e. NaOH concentration, hydrolysis time and... 

This paper presents a bi-objective VMI problem in a single manufacturer-single vendor multi-retailer (SM-SV-MR) supply chain, which a redundancy allocation problem is incorporated. In the hybridized problem, a manufacturer produces a single item using several machines that work in series, and stores it in a warehouse to replenish one vendor who delivers it to several retailers using the shortest possible route. A novel meta-heuristic, called hybrid bat algorithm (HBA), with calibrated parameters is utilized to find a near-optimum solution. To show the efficiency of HBA, the results are compared to the ones using the traditional BA and a genetic algorithm  

The vendor-managed inventory (VMI) is a common policy in supply chain management (SCM) to reduce bullwhip effects. Although different applications of VMI have been proposed in the literature, the multi-vendor multi-retailer single-warehouse (MV-MR-SW) case has not been investigated yet. This paper develops a constrained MV-MR-SW supply chain, in which both the space and the annual number of orders of the central warehouse are limited. The goal is to find the order quantities along with the number of shipments received by retailers and vendors such that the total inventory cost of the chain is minimized. Since the problem is formulated into an integer nonlinear programming model, the... 

In this paper, a multi-item economic production quantity model with fuzzy demand is developed in which shortages are backordered and the warehouse space is limited. While the demand is assumed to be a trapezoidal fuzzy number, the centroid defuzzification method is used to defuzzify fuzzy output functions. The Lagrangian relaxation procedure is first employed to solve the problem. Then, the model is extended to a constrained fuzzy integer nonlinear programming, in order to suit real-world situations. As the extended model cannot be solved in a reasonable time using exact methods, two meta-heuristic algorithms, named the genetic algorithm (GA) and the particle swarm optimisation (PSO) each... 

High-performing organisations are those which practise exemplary Culture of Excellence (CoE). Global competition dictates that only high-performing organisations will survive in the long term. This study attempts to focus on the relationship between CoE constructs and organisational performance (OP) in the context of Iranian manufacturing sector. Data are gathered via survey, of 222 excellence award-winning companies in Iran. The SPSS and smartPLS were used to test the relationship between CoE factors and OP. The result of correlation analysis proved that all 10 CoE constructs were significantly correlated with OP and there exists a significant relationship between CoE and OP. Strong... 

High-performing organisations are those which practise exemplary Culture of Excellence (CoE). Global competition dictates that only high-performing organisations will survive in the long term. This study attempts to focus on the relationship between CoE constructs and organisational performance (OP) in the context of Iranian manufacturing sector. Data are gathered via survey, of 222 excellence award-winning companies in Iran. The SPSS and smartPLS were used to test the relationship between CoE factors and OP. The result of correlation analysis proved that all 10 CoE constructs were significantly correlated with OP and there exists a significant relationship between CoE and OP. Strong... 

Breast cancer (BC) as a leading cause of cancer death among women, exhibits a wide range of genetic heterogeneity in affected individuals. Satisfactory management of BC depends on early diagnosis and proper monitoring of patients’ response to therapy. In this study, we aimed to assess the relation between the expression patterns of blood-based microRNAs (miRNAs) with demographic characteristics of the patients with BC in an attempt to find novel diagnostic markers for BC with acceptable precision in clinical applications. To this end, we performed comprehensive statistical analysis of the data of the Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) database and the blood miRNome dataset (GSE31309). As a result,... 

The non-linear flexural vibration for a double-tapered atomic force microscope cantilever has been investigated by using the Timoshenko beam theory. In this article, the normal and tangential tip-sample interaction forces are found from the Hertzian contact model, and the effects of the contact position, normal and lateral contact stiffness, height of the tip, thickness of the beam, angle between the cantilever and the sample surface, and breadth and height taper ratios on the non-linear frequency to linear frequency ratio have been studied. The differential quadrature method is employed to solve the non-linear differential equations of motion. The results show that the softening behaviour... 

Dimensionality reduction is a necessary task in data mining when working with high dimensional data. A type of dimensionality reduction is feature selection. Feature selection based on feature ranking has received much attention by researchers. The major reasons are its scalability, ease of use, and fast computation. Feature ranking methods can be divided into different categories and may use different measures for ranking features. Recently, ensemble methods have entered in the field of ranking and achieved more accuracy among others. Accordingly, in this paper a Heterogeneous ensemble based algorithm for feature ranking is proposed. The base ranking methods in this ensemble structure are... 

The non-linear flexural vibration for a dagger-shaped atomic force microscope cantilever has been investigated using the Timoshenko beam theory. In this article, the normal and tangential tip-sample interaction forces are found from Hertzian contact model and the effects of the geometry, normal and lateral contact stiffness, height of the tip, thickness of the beam, the angle between the cantilever and the sample surface and breadth and height taper ratios on the non-linear frequency to linear frequency ratio have been studied. The differential quadrature method (DQM) is employed to solve the non-linear differential equations of motion. The results show that the softening behaviour is seen...