Sharif Digital Repository

In this study, novel chitosan/poly(vinyl alcohol) (PVA)/SiO2 nanocomposite ENMs were prepared to improve the mechanical strength and permeation properties of ENMs. The effect of various concentrations of SiO2 in the spinning solution (0, 0.5, 1.0 and 2.0 wt %) on the morphology, fiber diameter, porosity, thermomechanical properties, and permeability of the synthesized membranes was investigated. The prepared affinity membranes were utilized for the removal of dye from colored wastewater. Incorporating SiO2, as a reinforcing agent, was found to increase the compaction resistance of the nanocomposite ENMs. With the addition of 0.5 wt % of SiO2, the Young's modulus of the prepared membranes... 

Novel montmorillonite (Mt) chitosan/poly(vinyl alcohol) (PVA) nanocomposite electrospun nanofibrous membranes (ENM) were prepared and utilized for the treatment of colored wastewater. The Mt. with different mass percentages (0, 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0 mass%) was added to the membrane structure, and its effect on morphology, pore size, porosity, mechanical strength, and permeation properties of ENM were investigated. The fabricated membranes were used as affinity membranes for dye removal with ultrafast permeating adsorption. The results showed that incorporating Mt. as a reinforcing agent improved the nanocomposite ENM resistance to compaction. Young's modulus for the prepared membranes increased... 

We study the effect of quantum fluctuations by means of a transverse magnetic field (Γ) on the antiferromagnetic J1-J2 Ising model on the checkerboard lattice, the two dimensional version of the pyrochlore lattice. The zero-temperature phase diagram of the model has been obtained by employing a plaquette operator approach (POA). The plaquette operator formalism bosonizes the model, in which a single boson is associated to each eigenstate of a plaquette and the inter-plaquette interactions define an effective Hamiltonian. The excitations of a plaquette would represent an-harmonic fluctuations of the model, which lead not only to lower the excitation energy compared with a single-spin flip but... 

We study the zero-Temperature phase diagram of transverse field Ising model on the J 1-J 2 square lattice. In zero magnetic field, the model has a classical Néel phase for J 2/J 1 < 0.5 and an antiferromagnetic collinear phase for J 2/J 1 > 0.5. We incorporate harmonic fluctuations by using linear spin wave theory (LSWT) with single spin flip excitations above a magnetic order background and obtain the phase diagram of the model in this approximation. We find that harmonic quantum fluctuations of LSWT fail to lift the large degeneracy at J 2/J 1 = 0.5 and exhibit some inconsistent regions on the phase diagram. However, we show that anharmonic fluctuations of cluster operator approach (COA)... 

We study the effect of quantum fluctuations by means of a transverse magnetic field (Γ) on the highly degenerate ground state of antiferromagnetic J1−J2 Ising model on the square lattice, at the limit J2/J1=0.5. We show that harmonic quantum fluctuations based on single spin flips can not lift such degeneracy, however an-harmonic quantum fluctuations based on multi spin cluster flip excitations lift the degeneracy toward a unique ground state with string-valence bond solid (VBS) nature. A cluster operator formalism has been implemented to incorporate an-harmonic quantum fluctuations. We show that cluster-type excitations of the model lead not only to lower the excitation energy compared with... 

Application of organic−inorganic nanocomposite membranes for water treatment is exceptionally growing owing to their tunable functionalities in addition to their enhanced permeation and antifouling propensity. In the present work, novel nanocomposite polyethersulfone (PES) membrane was synthesized using antimony-doped tin oxide (ATO) nanoparticles (NPs) via phase separation technique. It was found that the modified PES-ATO nanocomposite membranes exhibited significantly higher fouling resistance and larger permeate flux recovery ratio when tested with oil sands produced water than unmodified PES membranes. Furthermore, the PES-ATO membranes provided 40% more organic matter removal compared... 

A green hydrogen production method based on solar energy is proposed, and Machine Learning (ML) models are adopted for system optimization. This study assayed to highlight the potential of using ML in anticipating the performance of a Photovoltaic Thermal (PVT) system integrated with an electrolyzer device. For this purpose, the performance of four different ML models, including Extreme Learning Machine (ELM), Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU), and CatBoost, in predicting the hydrogen production of the solar-based system are analyzed. The hyperparameters of the ML models are optimized using the Arithmetic Optimization Algorithm (AOA). Furthermore, the optimum... 

Chitosan/poly(vinyl alcohol)/amino-functionalized montmorillonite nanocomposite electrospun membranes with enhanced adsorption capacity and thermomechanical properties were fabricated and utilized for the removal of a model cationic dye (Basic Blue 41). Effects of nanofiller concentrations (up to 3.0 wt %) on the morphology and size of the nanofibers as well as the porosity and thermomechanical properties of the nanocomposite membranes are studied. It is shown that the incorporation of the nanoclay particles with ∼10 nm lateral sizes into the polymer increases the size of the pores by about 80%. To demonstrate the efficiency of the adsorbents, the dye removal rate is investigated as a... 

We investigate the ground-state phase diagram of the frustrated transverse-field Ising (TFI) model on the checkerboard lattice (CL), which consists of Néel, collinear, quantum paramagnet, and plaquette-valence bond solid (-VBS) phases. We implement a numerical simulation that is based on the recently developed unconstrained tree tensor network ansatz, which systematically improves the accuracy over the conventional methods as it exploits the internal gauge selections. At the highly frustrated region (J2=J1), we observe a second-order phase transition from the plaquette-VBS state to the paramagnet phase at the critical magnetic-field Γc=0.28 with the associated critical exponents ν=1 and... 

The nonequilibrium dynamics of two-dimensional Su-Schrieffer-Heeger model, in the presence of staggered chemical potential, is investigated using the notion of dynamical quantum phase transition. We contribute to expanding the systematic understanding of the interrelation between the equilibrium quantum phase transition and the dynamical quantum phase transition (DQPT). Specifically, we find that dynamical quantum phase transition relies on the existence of massless propagating quasiparticles as signaled by their impact on the Loschmidt overlap. These massless excitations are a subset of all gapless modes, which leads to quantum phase transitions. The underlying two-dimensional model reveals... 

We investigate the ground-state nature of the transverse field Ising model on the J1-J2 square lattice at the highly frustrated point J2/J1=0.5. At zero field, the model has an exponentially large degenerate classical ground state, which can be affected by quantum fluctuations for nonzero field toward a unique quantum ground state. We consider two types of quantum fluctuations, harmonic ones by using linear spin-wave theory (LSWT) with single-spin-flip excitations above a long-range magnetically ordered background and anharmonic fluctuations, by employing a cluster-operator approach (COA) with multispin cluster-type fluctuations above a nonmagnetic cluster-ordered background. Our findings... 

Using multiple antennas at the transmit and receive sides of a passive radar brings both the benefits of MIMO radar and passive radar. However one of the obstacles arisen in such configuration is the receive antennas placement in proper positions so that the radar performance is improved. Here we just consider the case of positioning one receiver among multiple illuminators of opportunity. Indeed it is a start for the solution of optimizing the geometry of the multiple receivers in a passive radar  

SbCl3 supported on montmorillonite K-10 is an efficient catalyst for the ring opening of epoxides with aromatic amines under solvent-free conditions and microwave irradiation to give the corresponding b-amino alcohols in high yields with high regioselectivity  

In this paper, we consider an integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) system with wireless power transfer (WPT) where an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-based radar serves a group of energy-limited communication users in addition to its sensing functionality. In this architecture, the radar senses the environment in phase 1 (namely sensing phase) and mean-while, the communications users (nodes) harvest and store the energy from the radar transmit signal. The stored energy is then used for information transmission from the nodes to UAV in phase 2, i.e., uplink phase. Performance of the radar system depends on the transmit signal as well as the receive filter; the energy of the transmit... 

One of the important obstacles in MIMO (Multiple Input Multiple Output) radars is the issue of designing proper transmit signals. Indeed, the capability of signal design is a significant advantage in MIMO radars, through which, the system can achieve much better performance. Many different aspects of this performance improvement have been considered yet, and the transmit signals have been designed to attain such goal, e.g., getting higher SNR or better detector's performance at the receiver. However, an important tool for evaluating the radar's performance is its ambiguity function. In this paper, we consider the problem of transmit signal design, in order to optimize the ambiguity function... 

Two gains play key roles in recently developed MIMO wireless communication systems: "spatial diversity" gain and "spatial multiplexing" gain. The diversity gain refers to the capability to decrease the error rate of the MIMO channel, while the multiplexing gain implicitly refers to the amount of increase in the capacity of the MIMO channel. It has been shown that there is a fundamental tradeoff between these two types of gains, meaning interplay between increasing reliability (via an increase in the diversity gain) and increasing data rate (via an increase in the multiplexing gain). On the other hand, recently, MIMO radars have attracted much attention for their superior ability to enhance... 

It is a well known fact that using multiple antennas at transmit and receive sides improves the detection performance. However, in such multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) configuration, proper positioning of transmitters and receivers is a big challenge that can have significant influence on the performance of the overall system. In addition, determining the power of each transmitter under a total power constraint is a problem that should be solved in order to enhance the performance and coverage of such a system. In this paper, we design the Neyman-Pearson detector under the Rayleigh scatter model and use it to introduce a criterion for the antenna placement at both transmit and receive... 

There has been much interest, recently, towards exploiting the Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) technique in radar. It is shown that using multiple antennas at transmit and receive sides can improve the performance of the system. However, in order to analyze the system's performance, its ambiguity function, i.e. the ambiguity function of a MIMO radar, is needed to be defined. In this paper, beginning from the information theoretic definitions, we derive such function, specifically for a MIMO radar with widely separated antennas