Sharif Digital Repository

Atmospheric aerosols affect the Earth's climate, air quality, and thus human health. This study used the Aerosol Optical Depth (AOD) and the Ångström exponent to cluster different particle types over the Lake Urmia Basin. This classification found desert dust and marine (mixed with continental or local-pollution aerosols) as two main aerosol types over the region, while their sources are not well defined. Although different air masses and wind circulation over the study domain in varied months can help to distinguish aerosol sources, measurements are crucial for a complete evaluation  

Hospital ventilation is defined as the providing of fresh and clean air stream in hospital wards or patients’ room to provide and establish a healthy environment for personnel’s and patient’s breath, reducing concentration of produced contaminations in hospital and removing them from clean spaces. Thus, it can prevent spread of airborne infections among patients, people who works around and more importantly, outside the hospital. Hospital infections have a huge influence on mortality of the patients in which respiratory tract infections and surgical wound infections plays a major role. Depending on the quality and the mass flow rate of the exploited air, cleanness of a surgery room can be... 

A new mathematical method is proposed to model the transport of polydisperse submicron aerosol particles in a heterogeneous porous media, and as an example, it is applied to study the transport of mainstream smoke aerosol particles in the cigarette tobacco column. The tobacco column is composed of randomly distributed pores and the aerosol particle transport is modeled utilizing a pore sub-model and taking into account aerosol particle coagulation and deposition. Copyright © 2009 Begell House, Inc  

This study examines different soot sub-models to simulate the soot nano-aerosol formation in turbulent kerosene-surrogate flames. The examinations are carried out at three different elevated pressures. We use a two-equation soot model considering the aerosol dynamics and chemistry of soot nano-particles, i.e. nucleation, coagulation, surface growth, and oxidation. Four different soot sub-models are used to predict the structures of pressurized flames. These structures are then compared with each other as well as the data collected by experiment. Our findings indicate that the acetylene soot-inception sub-model performs poorly in prediction of the flames’ structures at different elevated... 

Trapping a single aerosol using optical tweezers could be of great importance for environmental sciences. Though a single nanoparticle as small as 10 nm is successfully trapped in aqueous media using optical tweezers, due to spherical aberration only large clusters of nanoparticles were stably trapped in air. In this paper we provide our theoretical and experimental results on optimized trapping of aerosols as small as 400 nm in radius by the introduction of an extra spherical aberration source in order to minimize the total spherical aberration of the system. Our method allows for trapping of high refractive index particles such as polystyrene beads in air. It also provides considerably... 

In this work, we numerically study the effect of a mini-scale primary-air injector on the formation of soot nano-particles in a model tubular-type gas-turbine combustor fed with JP, i.e. gaseous JP-1. We solve a documented experimental (benchmark) test case to evaluate our numerical solution and compare the achieved flame structure with that of the measured and reported data. The obtained numerical results show good agreements with the experimental data. After ensuring the validity of numerical tool, we install a mini-scale injector, split the incoming air-flow between the primary and secondary streams, inject the primary air into the combustor via the mini-scale injector, and compare the... 

Particulate matter (PM) pollution is a growing concern in urban areas in the developing countries because of its potential to aggravate cardiovascular and respiratory illnesses. Traditional approaches in monitoring urban pollutants have relied on ground-based networks even though they essentially provide point measurements and are inadequate for health alerts on large spatial and long temporal scales. Recent advances in satellite imagery has attracted managers to look into this new alternative as a predictive tool for improving air quality at urban and regional scales by providing necessary data in advance of the onset of actual severe conditions. Moderate Resolution Imaging... 

In this study, we implement a numerical model to predict secondary organic aerosol (SOA) formation from semi- and intermediate-volatility organic compounds emitted from in-use gasoline and diesel vehicles. The model is formulated based on the volatility basis set (VBS) approach, and it accounts for OH oxidation of unspeciated low-volatility organics, which are classified by their volatility. This model incorporates SOA formation data from smog chamber and emission measurements of vehicle exhaust in a Hybrid framework to calculate the contribution of both traditional and non-traditional SOA precursors to total SOA formation observed in photo-oxidation experiments. Emission and SOA formation... 

Background: Air pollutants have not been associated with ambulatory electrocardiographic evidence of ST-segment depression ≥ 1 mm (probable cardiac ischemia). We previously found that markers of primary (combustion-related) organic aerosols and gases were positively associated with circulating biomarkers of inflammation and ambulatory blood pressure in the present cohort panel study of elderly subjects with coronary artery disease. Objectives: We specifically aimed to evaluate whether exposure markers of primary organic aerosols and ultrafine particles were more strongly associated with ST-segment depression of ≥ 1 mm than were secondary organic aerosols or PM 2.5 (particulate matter with... 

Lake Urmia (LU) once was the second largest hypersaline lake in the world, covering up to 6000 km2, but has undergone catastrophic desiccation in recent years resulting in loss of 90% of its area and extensive coverage by playas and marshlands that represent a source of salt and dust. This study examines daily Aerosol Optical Depth (AOD) data from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) between 2001 and 2015 over northwestern Iran, which encompasses LU. Intriguingly, salt emissions from the LU surface associated with ongoing desiccation do not drive the study region's AOD profile, whereas pollution transported from other regions and emissions around LU are more important.... 

Modeling the behavior of suspended particles in gaseous phase is important for diverse reasons; e.g. aerosol is usually the main subject of CFD simulations in clean rooms. Additionally, to determine the rate and sites of deposition of particles suspended in inhaled air, the motion of the particles should be predicted in lung airways. Meanwhile there are two basically different approaches to simulate the behavior of particles suspension, Lagrangian and Eulerian approaches. This study compares the results of these two approaches on simulating the same problem. An in-house particle tracking code was developed to simulate the motion of particles with Lagrangian approach. In order to simulate the...