Sharif Digital Repository

Fluid control, namely pumping and valving, is a critical factor in the performance of micro-fluidic systems. In recent years a variety of micro-fluidic systems are developed for the purpose of miniaturizing fluid handling, and chemical analysis to develop Lab On a Chip (LOC) technology. The mentioned facts resulted in design and fabrication of a novel hydromagnetic flow controller. The idea behind this device is that magnetic particles, mixed and dispersed in a carrier liquid, can be accumulated in the form of a piston. Depending upon dragging speed of these pistons, which itself is a function of switching time, this device can be used to either increase (pumping) or decrease (valving) the... 

The novel idea of the Hydromagnetic Micropump and Flow Controller (HMFC) is used in this paper to construct a laboratory setup capable of bidirectional pumping and controlling the flow in microtubes. A laboratory setup, which contains no moving parts, is integrated with a pressure-driven flow setup to make the presented HMFC device. The device operation is based on controllable motion of magnetic particles, added to the carrier fluid, caused by the magnetic field, produced by solenoids located just next to the microtube. The magnitude of these forces is proportional to the strength and gradient of magnetic field which, in turn, is related to the electrical current and arrangement of the... 

The significant importance of micro-scaled devices in medicine, lab-on-a-chip, and etc resulted in a vast variety of researches. The idea behind the novel hydro magnetic micro-pump and flow controller is that ferromagnetic particles, mixed and dispersed in a carrier fluid, can be accumulated and retained at specific sites to form pistons in a micro-tube using some external magnetic field sources along the micro-tube. This external magnetic field is related to some solenoids, which are turned on and off alternatively. Depending upon dragging speed of these pistons, which itself is a function of switching time, this device can be used to either increase (pumping) or decrease (valving) the flow... 

Buoyancy-induced fluid flow, which is responsible for most forms of macro-segregation and channel-type segregates in castings, is not directly controllable. If left uncontrolled, natural convection will contribute to non-uniform distribution of alloy constituents and grain structure during solidification of a casting. Non-uniform distribution of chemical composition and physical structure in an alloy casting can significantly affect the reliability of mechanical components. Therefore, materials with acceptable defects can be produced only by trial-and-error and their acceptability is determined by costly inspections. We present a novel technique to control the formation of chimneys and... 

This paper studies the problem of secure and resilient distributed cooperative control for autonomous vehicles under false data injection attacks on the vehicular communication net-work. We propose a model-based scheme to detect unknown data falsification attacks using the predicted traj ectory in a distributed nonlinear model predictive control problem. First, as a local agent, each autonomous vehicle stores the information received from its neighboring vehicles to clarify anomalies. The recorded data is investigated over a temporal moving observation window which contains different prediction sequences of the distributed nonlinear model predictive control problem in the previous times. In... 

A novel rotary magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) (RMHD) micropump is presented in this paper in order to both benefit exclusive advantages from the MHD micropumps and eliminate the current obstacles in their implementation. Lorentz force, which is the actuation mechanism in RMHD, is used to propel a mercury slug in a circular microchannel in order to suck the working fluid from the inlet and pump it to the outlet. This idea is integrated with a valve which prevents the working fluid from passing through, while allowing the mercury slug to pass, during each pumping loop. The performance of a fabricated RMHD is evaluated, considering parameters such as pressure difference, running duration, electric... 

In this paper, a cooperative approach for control heterogeneous connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs) platoon considering lane-change maneuvers is proposed. In complex dynamic traffic environment, the speed of the surrounding vehicles of CAVs changes dynamically. Thus, the lane changing vehicle requires considering velocity fluctuations to achieve safe driving. The aim of this study is to combine dynamic path planning based on a cubic curve and model predictive control (MPC) with collision avoidance constraint to track an optimally generated path. The proposed control performs as a maneuver switching model including the vehicle's continuous states and discrete maneuver transition rule for... 

The way central nervous system manages the excess degrees of freedom to solve kinetic redundancy of musculoskeletal system remains an open question. In this study, we utilise the concept of synergy formation as a simplifying control strategy to find the muscle recruitment based on summation of identified muscle synergies to balance the biomechanical demands (biaxial external torque) during an isometric shoulder task. A numerical optimisation-based shoulder model was used to obtain muscle activation levels when a biaxial external isometric torque is imposed at the shoulder glenohumeral joint. In the numerical simulations, 12 different shoulder torque vectors in the transverse plane are... 

In this paper, new polymer composites were synthesized by template copolymerization of aniline and metanilic acid in the presence of prepared melamine triacetic acid and poly(melamine-co-citric acid) as polyacids and dopants. The properties of the poly(aniline-co-metanilic acid) composites were studied by Fourier transform infrared, X-ray diffraction, scanning electron microscope, CV, and differential scanning calorimeter analysis. The four-point probe technique was used for evaluating the electrical conductivity of the composites. The scanning electron micrographs disclosed that the products had the morphology with agglomerated distorted spherical shapes with the average size of 40–50 nm.... 

In this paper, new polymer composites were synthesized by template copolymerization of aniline and metanilic acid in the presence of prepared melamine triacetic acid and poly(melamine-co-citric acid) as polyacids and dopants. The properties of the poly(aniline-co-metanilic acid) composites were studied by Fourier transform infrared, X-ray diffraction, scanning electron microscope, CV, and differential scanning calorimeter analysis. The four-point probe technique was used for evaluating the electrical conductivity of the composites. The scanning electron micrographs disclosed that the products had the morphology with agglomerated distorted spherical shapes with the average size of 40–50 nm.... 

Position sensorless control of ac machines at zero and low speed is possible using high-frequency carrier injection methods. These methods utilize anisotropic properties of rotor. Therefore, they may lose their efficiency for nonsalient machines or machines with small rotor saliency. In these machines, measurement noise and offset, existing delays, as well as model uncertainties may lead to inaccurate estimation of rotor position. Stator resistance which is usually neglected in these methods may also lead to a considerable error especially in machines with small rotor saliency. In this paper, a new position estimation method is presented, and it is shown that in comparison to conventional... 

Characteristics of connections in steel moment-resisting frames are of utmost importance in determining the seismic performance of these structural systems. The results of several previous experimental studies have indicated that Partially Restrained (PR) connections possess excellent properties, which make them a reliable substitution for Fully Restrained (FR) connections. These properties include needing less base shear, being more economic, and, in many cases, being able to absorb more energy. In this study, the behavior of two proposed PR connections with torsional plate is studied through finite element simulations. The results of the numerical studies regarding initial stiffness and... 

In the present work, a simple, green, rapid, and catalyst-free procedure for the synthesis of benzamide derivatives by ring opening of azlactones with diamines such as ethylene diamine and 1,3-propylenediamine is described. The present method offers several advantages such as short reaction times, easy work-up, and mild reaction conditions in the absence of catalyst and any toxic solvent and material. In addition, the structure obtained by X-ray crystallography was compared with the theoretical results obtained by density functional theory using the B3LYP functional and cc-pVDZ basis sets  

in this paper detection and the accuracy of measurement of range, velocity and DOA in PCL radar for optimized parameters is considered. It is shown that, in order to measure the bistatic characteristics of a target, we can process the monostatic ambiguity function and extract the bistatic factors by proposed Algorithm. ©2006 IEEE  

In this study we utilize the concept of synergy formation as a simplifying control strategy to manage the high number of degrees of freedom presented in the maintenance of the posture of the shoulder joint. We address how to find the muscle synergy recruitment map to the biomechanical demands (biaxial external torque) during an isometric shoulder task. We use a numerical optimization based shoulder model to obtain muscle activation levels when a biaxial external isometric torque is exposed at the shoulder glenohumeral joint. In the numerical simulations, different shoulder torque vectors parallel to the horizontal plane are considered. For each selected direction for the torque, the... 

Solid-phase microextraction (SPME) is a fast, solvent-free technique, which, since its introduction in the 1990s, has been increasingly applied to sample preparation in analytical chemistry. Conventional SPME fibers are fabricated by making a physical bond between the usual silica substrate and the polymeric coatings. However, some applications are limited, as the lifetime and the stability of conventional SPME fibers cannot meet the demands of analyzing relatively non-volatile compounds with more polar moieties. There have been attempts to analyze less volatile compounds by increasing the thermal, physical and chemical stability of the fibers. In this review, we present some new... 

Research projects in urban transportation systems require proper simulation softwares. Such softwares are the basic requirements of any kind of study in electrical transportation systems. Due to high energy consumption of these systems, studies for its optimization are challenging and necessary. In this paper an optimized timetable of trains? movement is proposed in order to completely utilize the regenerative energy of trains? braking in stations. A sample subway system is simulated and Genetic algorithm is used as an optimization method. The effect of headway and reserve times on the amount of energy consumption is studied and an optimized reserve time set is found for the sample system.... 

Simulation optimization is an endeavor to determine the best combination of inputs that result in the best system performance criterion without evaluating all possible combinations. Since simulation optimization applies to many problems, it is extensively studied in the literature with different methods. However, most of these methods ignore the uncertainty of the systems’ parameters, which may lead to a solution that is not robustly optimal in reality. Motivated by this uncertainty, we propose a robust simulation optimization algorithm that follows the well-known Taguchi standpoint but replaces its statistical technique with a minimax method based on the kriging (Gaussian process)... 

High-performance wearable electronic devices with the capability of converting mechanical force into electrical energy have been gaining increasing attention for biomedical monitoring applications. We present a novel wearable piezoelectric sensor based on a poly(vinylidene fluoride) (PVDF) nanofibrous membrane containing microporous zirconium-based metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) for arterial pulse monitoring. It is shown that the incorporation of 5 wt % of MOF greatly enhances the piezoelectric constant of the polymer fibrous mat by 3.4-fold without significant loss in its flexibility. The nanofibrous composite exhibits a peak-to-peak voltage of 600 mV under an applied force of 5 N, which...