Sharif Digital Repository

Diabetes mellitus is a global endemic with a rapidly increasing prevalence in both developing and developed countries. Recently, hemoglobin A1c has been recommended by the American Diabetes Associations as a possible substitute for fasting blood glucose for the diagnosis of diabetes, because it is an indicator of long-term glycemic control. Also, centrifugal microfluidic systems have good potential for use in the point of care testing systems. In this study, a centrifugal microfluidic disc was designed and manufactured to measure hemoglobin A1c in whole blood using an immunoturbidimetry based method. Also, a new passive valve, named septum valve, was presented to precisely control the entry... 

Microfluidics has been becoming more and more popular over last two decades. The reason for this, is inherent features of microfluidics including low consumption of samples and reagents, high sensitivity, short analysis time, and low cost. As well as, centrifugal microfluidics as a subset of microfluidics has been able to prove itself as a helpful tool in analytic assays. The main application of centrifugal microfluidic devices is being used in point-of-care testing systems. Herein, we presented a microfluidic disc for measuring hemoglobin(Hb) concentration in the EDTA-anticoagulated venous blood using cyanmethemoglobin method. In this experiment, at first a hand-made standard solution was... 

Undoubtedly, microfluidics has been a focal point of interdisciplinary science during the last two decades, resulting in many developments in this area. Centrifugal microfluidic platforms have good potential for use in point-of-care devices because they take advantage of some intrinsic forces, most notably centrifugal force, which obviates the need to any external driving forces. Herein, we introduce a newly designed detection chamber for use on microfluidic discs that can be employed as an absorbance readout step in cases where the final solution has a very low viscosity and surface tension. In such situations, our chamber easily eliminates the air bubbles from the final solution without... 

In this article, we synthesize a novel gelatin-based superabsorbent hydrogel via graft copolymerization of mixtures of acrylic acid (AA) and acrylamide (AAm) onto gelatin backbones. The polymerization reaction was carried out in an aqueous medium and in the presence of ammonium persulfate (APS) as an initiator and N,N-methylene bisacrylamide (MBA) as a crosslinker. The hydrogel structures were confirmed by FTIR spectroscopy. The effect of grafting variables, i.e. concentration of MBA and APS, AA/AAm weight ratio, and reaction time and temperature, was systematically optimized to achieve a hydrogel with swelling capacity as high as possible. The swelling behavior of these absorbent polymers... 

A hallmark of more advanced models is their higher details of trunk muscles represented by a larger number of muscles. The question is if in reality we control these muscles individually as independent agents or we control groups of them called "synergy". To address this, we employed a 3-D biomechanical model of the spine with 18 trunk muscles that satisfied equilibrium conditions at L4/5, with different cost functions. The solutions of several 2-D and 3-D tasks were arranged in a data matrix and the synergies were computed by using non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) algorithms. Variance accounted for (VAF) was used to evaluate the number of synergies that emerged by the analysis, which... 

At room temperature, SO 2- 4/nano-TiO 2 efficiently catalyze the direct Mannich-type reaction of varieties of in situ-generated aldimines using aldehydes and anilines with ketones in a three-component reaction under solvent-free conditions. The reaction proceeds rapidly and affords the correspondingβ-amino ketones in good to high yields with good to excellent stereoselectivity. The catalyst can be recycled for subsequent reactions without any appreciable loss of efficiency  

In tunneling projects and open-pit mines, drilling and blasting is a common method for fragmenting the rock masses. Although fragmentation is the main aim of blasting, the adverse effects such as air-overpressure (AOp) and ground vibration are unavoidable. Among these unwanted effects, AOp is considered as one of the most important effects which can cause damage to nearby structures. Therefore, precise estimation of AOp is required for minimizing the environmental problems. This article proposes three new models for predicting blast-induced AOp at Shur river dam area, Iran, optimized by particle swarm optimization (PSO). For this aim, 80 blasting events were investigated and the requirement... 

In tunneling projects and open-pit mines, drilling and blasting is a common method for fragmenting the rock masses. Although fragmentation is the main aim of blasting, the adverse effects such as air-overpressure (AOp) and ground vibration are unavoidable. Among these unwanted effects, AOp is considered as one of the most important effects which can cause damage to nearby structures. Therefore, precise estimation of AOp is required for minimizing the environmental problems. This article proposes three new models for predicting blast-induced AOp at Shur river dam area, Iran, optimized by particle swarm optimization (PSO). For this aim, 80 blasting events were investigated and the requirement... 

This article deals with the rubber-based friction materials (RBFMs) which can be used in brake system. The physico-mechanical and tribological properties of a series of fiber filled RBFMs containing steel wool and aramid pulp at different concentrations along with a fiber-free reference material were characterized. Rubber-glass transition induced at higher sliding velocities was identified based on the friction fade behavior of the RBFMs. The rubber-glass transition which is inherently originated by viscoelastic response of polymeric binder was found to be influential on the tribological properties of the RBFMs. It was revealed that steel wool increased coefficient of friction (COF) and...