Sharif Digital Repository

This study investigated the effects of different patterns of coronary artery tortuosity (CAT) on the stress concentration of the plaques and the blood flow pattern inside an atherosclerotic artery to predict the risk of plaque rupture and progression. Four different loadings of the coronary artery, including pulsatile blood pressure as well as one-end twist around the artery axis at blood pressures of 74, 100, and 120 mmHg were considered. No study has addressed bent and twist buckling of an atherosclerotic artery considering pulsatile flow (for bent buckling), fluid-solid interaction, and different geometrical parameters of the plaque. The results showed that C-shape tortuosity under... 

Plug-In hybrid electric vehicles could be connected to the electrical grid to be recharged. To ease the charging process, one solution could use an on-board charger to charge the electric vehicle battery. This charger should be able to be connected to a conventional outlet for convenience reasons and moreover, it should be a grid friendly charger in order not to pollute the electrical network. Since most of the electric vehicle related projects are at their initial phases, keeping up with the pace and developing new technologies and proposing innovations and concepts will help growing the industry. In this regard, a new integrated bidirectional isolated soft-switched plug-in hybrid electric... 

This study was designed to investigate the effect of changing the location of the center of mass (COM) of transfemoral prostheses on the spatiotemporal and kinematical characteristics of the amputee gait, while maintaining the prosthetic mass fixed. Ten men with unilateral traumatic transfemoral amputation participated in gait analysis, 2-min walk and subject preference tests. Weights were added to the original prosthetic legs in three conditions: 600. g added to the ankle, 600. g added at 10. cm distal to the prosthetic knee, and 300. g added to the ankle, and 300. g at 10. cm distal to the knee. For each prosthetic mass condition, the stride and step lengths, stepping speed, stance, swing... 

Heaters are one of the central parts of natural gas reduction stations using turboexpanders to prevent the formation of hydrate and corrosion failure. This study intends to design a fired heater by applying a combustion sub-model to derive an optimal model for this kind of application. This model is developed to accurately consider all subsections of the fired heater namely radiation, convection, and shield sections, as well as flue gas composition, and its volume. Within this context, a multi-objective optimization is employed to identify the optimal design of the gas-fired heater in the natural gas reduction station for the Ramin power plant case study. The total economic and environmental... 

The preheating system is regarded as an integral part of a natural-gas pressure reduction station (NGPRS) when a turbo-expander is substituted with regulators. In this paper, two configurations are compared for optimal designing preheating system used in NGPRS with the turbo-expander system. The first case uses water for a hot fluid that is warmed in the gas-fired heater (GFH), and the second is a Waste Heat Recovery (WHR) configuration. Multi-objective optimization and multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) methods are implemented to identify the optimal design of mentioned preheating systems and to acquire the ability for the designer to select the optimal solution readily. The total cost... 

Battery and plug-in hybrid vehicles equipped with bidirectional battery chargers are capable of supplying power to the electric grid according to power system demand. This technology is called 'vehicle to grid' or V2G. A bidirectional on-board charger can be used to improve the charge availability. An on-board charger should have small size and light weight. On the other hand, the charger must minimize power quality impact, draw current at high power factor to maximize power from an outlet. In this paper, a new three-phase integrated bidirectional isolated soft-switched battery charger is proposed which is appropriate for vehicle to grid technology. The charger utilizes a 4-switch... 

Benefitting from an analogy between compressible and incompressible governing equations, a novel dual-purpose, pressure-based finite-volume algorithm is suitably extended to simulate laminar mixing and reacting flows in low-Mach-number regimes. In our test cases, the Mach number is as high as 0.00326. Definitely, such low-Mach-number flows cannot be readily solved by either regular density-based solvers or most of their extensions. To examine the accuracy and performance of the extended formulation and algorithm, we simulate two benchmark cases including the mixing natural-convection flow in a square cavity with strong temperature gradients and the premixed reacting flow through annuli with... 

Plug-in hybrid electric vehicles draw electricity from the electrical grid and store energy in their batteries. To increase charge availability for plug-in hybrid electric vehicles, on-board chargers can be used, which should be small in size and lightweight. In this article, an on-board bidirectional soft-switched battery charger is proposed that utilizes a phase-shift-controlled dual-bridge series resonant converter with isolation. The bidirectional characteristic of proposed charger makes it suitable for vehicle-to-grid operation (i.e., injecting power from the vehicle to the grid) in smart grids. A switching control scheme is also proposed to provide soft-switching operation for all... 

Background: Chronic low back pain (CLBP) disability has been particularly frustrating because its treatment has been a great therapeutic challenge. Disability has been suggested to depend on different factors that should be found and considered in the medical management. The inter-segmental coordination is often impaired in CLBP subjects; however, to the best of our knowledge, there is no evidence about the relationship between the existence of coordination problems and disability in CLBP patients. Objective: To evaluate the correlation between sagittal plane trunk-pelvis intersegmental coordination parameters during walking and disability level in CLBP patients. Methods: Kinematic data were... 

The synthesis of nanocomposites via in situ grafting polymerization due to its ability to produce polymeric materials with promising microscopic and macroscopic characteristics is becoming very attractive. In this paper, different poly(L-Lactide)-block-poly(ε-caprolactone) (PLLA-b-PCL) copolymers were in situ synthesized in the presence of modified titanium dioxide (TiO2) nanoparticles (mTNP) as the initiator and stannous octoate as the catalyst. The surface of TiO2 was modified by grafting aminopropyl trimethoxy silane to improve initiator efficiency. Copolymers with 90/10, 70/30, and 50/50 mass ratio of L-lactide/ ε-caprolactone and 5 wt% of mTNP (proportional to ε-caprolactone) were... 

The turbo-expander system is utilized instead of the pressure regulator to avoid exergy destruction occurring in gas pressure reduction systems. However, due to the variation of natural gas input conditions such as mass flow rate, the sustainable performance of this technology is challenging. In this study, at first, the optimal system design of gas pressure reducing station equipped with radial expansion turbine is performed. It is based on economic and exergy analyses as well as considering geometric, fluid, thermodynamic constraints of components and the systematic constraints. To do so, detailed design models of main components including mean-line design model of radial turbine,... 

Incorporating titanium dioxide (TiO2) nanoparticles into the polymeric matrix offers an opportunity to obtain nanocomposites with improved functionality. In this study, the commercial TiO2 nanoparticles (TNP) were surface treated by different concentrations of aminopropyl triethoxy silane (APTS) as a coupling agent and triethylamine (Et3N) as a surface grafting catalyst by an aqueous process to prepare a nanocomposite with superior properties. Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) and thermogravimetric analysis (TGA) were performed to confirm the successful surface modification of TNP. The prepared modified TiO2 nanoparticles (mTNP) with different weight fractions were used as... 

In this paper, we present a polynomial time algorithm for the problem of differentially private all pair shortest distances over the class of low tree-width graphs. Our result generalizes the result of Sealfon [10] for the case of trees to a much larger family of graphs. Furthermore, if we restrict to the class of low tree-width graphs, the additive error of our algorithm is significantly smaller than that of the best known algorithm for this problem, proposed by Chen et. al. in [3]. © 2023 IEEE  

The wave functions for calculating 13C nuclear magnetic chemical shifts of 22 groups of organic compounds (64 molecules) in chloroform solution have been optimally selected using factorial design as a multivariate technique. Our own N-layered integrated molecular orbital and molecular mechanics approach was applied for molecules with different types of carbons. The results have obtained in very good agreement with the experimental values. An additional series (58 molecules) have been used as test sets and their results confirm the validity and reliability of the approaches. The total root mean square deviation and correlation coefficient of predictions (433 carbons) are 1.88 and .9994,... 

Water was found to be a highly efficient and green catalyst and solvent for ring-opening reaction of epoxides with Na2S at room temperature to give substituted bis(hydroxyethyl)thioethers in high yields  

Inter-segmental coordination can be influenced by chronic low back pain (CLBP). The sagittal plane lower extremities inter-segmental coordination pattern and variability, in conjunction with the pelvis and trunk, were assessed in subjects with and without non-specific CLBP during free-speed walking. Kinematic data were collected from 10 non-specific CLBP and 10 non-CLBP control volunteers while the subjects were walking at their preferred speed. Sagittal plane time-normalized segmental angles and velocities were used to calculate continuous relative phase for each data point. Mean absolute relative phase (MARP) and deviation phase (DP) were derived to quantify the trunk-pelvis and bilateral... 

A simple catalyst LiClO4/Et3N has been developed and demonstrated to efficiently catalyze Michael addition reactions of active methylene compounds to conjugated ketones, nitriles, esters and nitroalkenes with remarkably high yields and in short reaction time. The Michael addition to nitroalkenes and α,β-unsaturated ketones proceeds quantitatively in the usual way, giving the monoaddition product. © 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved  

Transport properties of doped nanotube-based double junctions forming a nanotransistor and investigated within the tight binding formalism. The effects of doping gate length and gate soften have been considered. It is found that in addition to the importance of rotational symmetry in determining transport properties, large gains can be achieved for semiconducting doped tubes  

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: It is suggested that activation of the transverse abdominis muscle has a stabilizing effect on the lumbar spine by raising intra-abdominal pressure without added disc compression. However, its feedforward activity has remained a controversial issue. In addition, research regarding bilateral activation of trunk muscles during a unilateral arm movement is limited. The aim of this study was to evaluate bilateral anticipatory activity of trunk muscles during unilateral arm flexion.MATERIALS AND METHODS: Eighteen healthy subjects (aged 25 ± 3.96 years) participated in this study and performed 10 trials of rapid arm flexion in response to a visual stimulus. The... 

Objectives: Previous research has shown inconsistent findings regarding muscle endurance in chronic low back pain (CLBP). Questions also remain about muscle endurance in patients with clinical instability. The aim of this study was to investigate trunk muscles strength and endurance in CLBP patients with and without clinical instability. Methods: 32 CLBP patients (15 with and 17 without clinical instability) and 39 matched healthy subjects participated in this study. The standing extension test was performed to assess the strength and endurance of the lumbar extensors while recording their electromyographic activity. The patients' disability was evaluated using the Oswestry and Roland-Morris...