Sharif Digital Repository

The main goal of this study is to further understanding of the role of rubber particles on deformation mechanisms in PP/EPR blend. For doing this standard tensile specimens were produced using injection molding. The results of microscopic evaluation of tensile specimen after some stretching show that damage forms in some points and then propagates in different directions. Also some elongated voids are observed, those are probably formed due to cavitation of rubber particles or debonding at the interface. With regard to achieved micrographs one may conclude that the deformation mechanism in PP/EPR blend can be massive dilatational shear banding due to repeated cavitation. © 2003 Elsevier Ltd.... 

Flow mediated dilation (FMD) is a non-invasive method for endothelial function assessment providing an index extracted from ultrasonic B-mode images. Although utilized in the research community, the difficulty of its application and high cost of ultrasonic devices prevent it from being widely used in clinical settings. In this study we show that substituting the ultrasonic device with more easily handled and low cost photoplethysmography and electrocardiography is possible. We introduce new indices based on the photoplethysmogram (PPG) and electrocardiogram (ECG) and show that they are correlated with the ultrasound-based FMD Index. To this end, a conventional ultrasound FMD test was carried... 

Dilation of a set of points on the plane is the lowest possible dilation of a plane spanner on the point set. We show that dilation of vertices of any regular polygon is less than 1.4482. We introduce a method for constructing a triangulation of a regular polygon and prove this bound on its dilation. The upper bound on dilation is shown using mathematical proofs and experimental results. The new upper bound improves the previously known bound of 1.48454. © 2019 Elsevier B.V  

Dyslipidemia is considered to be one of the main heart risk factors, affecting the endothelial vascular function, which can be non-invasively investigated by ultrasound flow-mediated dilation (US-FMD). However, US-FMD comes at a high-cost and is operator-dependent. In this paper, the effect of dyslipidemia on the photoplethysmogram (PPG) signal recorded from collateral index fingers is investigated following a previous study where it was shown that results similar to that of US-FMD can be replicated by the PPG. Two groups, consisting of 30 healthy subjects free from any risk factors and 30 subjects who have only dyslipidemia as risk factor were respectively considered. The percent change in... 

Non-invasive measurement of flow-mediated dilation (FMD) in the brachial artery for assessing endothelial function is costly and operator-dependent, limiting its application to research cases. In this paper, an approach based on a physiological model between normalized central blood pressure and finger photoplethysmogram is presented. Baseline model parameters are estimated using a genetic algorithm in 30 subjects consisting of ten normal blood pressure (BP), ten high-BP and ten elderly volunteers. Beat-to-beat fitness values after reactive hyperaemia are calculated using baseline (before cuff occlusion) data. Results show that stimulus-induced changes are fairly described with a first order... 

By expansion of digital multimedia and networking technology, the problem of ownership protection has become increasingly important. Digital watermarking is an efficient way for copyright protection of digital images. Traditional watermarking techniques degrade the quality of host image by embedding a watermark logo. Facing this problem, a new watermarking approach called zero-watermarking has been proposed. In zero-watermarking methods, the watermark does not require to be embedded into the protected image but it uses both the watermark and the protected image to generate a verification map which is registered to a trusted authority for further protection. In this paper we propose a robust... 

Give a triangulation of a set of points on the plane, dilation of any two points is defined as the ratio between the length of the shortest path of these points and their Euclidean distance. Minimum dilation triangulation is a triangulation in which the maximum dilation between any pair of the points is minimized. We give upper bounds on the dilation of the minimum dilation triangulation for two kinds of point sets: An upper bound of nsin⁡(π/n)/2 for a centrally symmetric convex point set containing n points, and an upper bound of 1.19098 for a set of points on the boundary of a semicircle. © 2018 Elsevier B.V  

For microbial enhanced oil recovery (MEOR), different mechanisms have been introduced. In some of these papers, the phenomena and mechanisms related to biosurfactants produced by certain microorganisms were discussed, while others studied the direct impacts of the properties of microorganisms on the related mechanisms. However, there are only very few papers dealing with the direct impacts of microorganisms on interfacial properties. In the present work, the interfacial properties of three bacteria MJ02 (Bacillus Subtilis type), MJ03 (Pseudomonas Aeruginosa type), and RAG1 (Acinetobacter Calcoaceticus type) with the hydrophobicity factors 2, 34, and 79% were studied, along with their direct... 

Flow mediated dilation (FMD) measurement using ultrasound imaging (FMD-US) has been established as a standard method for assessing the endothelial function. Recently, a less skilled-operator demanding method has been proposed based on the photoplethysmogram (PPG) changes during reactive hyperemia. It was shown that the amplitude of the PPG pulse (FMD-PPG) changed in a quite similar manner to that of the artery diameter in the method of the FMD-US i.e. increases following releasing the cuff and then gradually returns to baseline. In this study PPG changes following reactive hyperaemia were modelled using time-varying passive electrical elements (R, L and C). The output of the electric analog... 

To investigate the influences of microstructure changes on dilatancy of unsaturated loess at high suctions, a direct shear box device using the vapour equilibrium technique was used. Through conducting two series of direct shear tests on both intact and recompacted loess specimens and also investigating microstructural changes using the mercury intrusion porosim-etry (MIP) technique, a linear increase in dilatancy with suctions ranging from 8 to 230 MPa can be identified at different net stresses. The enhanced dilatancy observed is mainly attributed to desiccation-induced high suctions as the reduction in void ratio due to enhancement of suction was negligible. A macrovoid ratio, eM, may be... 

Endothelial dysfunction assessment has received considerable attention due to its potential in early screening of cardiovascular diseases. Since the seminal work by Celermajer in flow-mediated dilation (FMD) based on B-mode ultrasound measurement of the brachial artery dilation following limb ischemia, many attempts have been made toward applying this method to clinical, non-invasive endothelial dysfunction assessment. One major obstacle toward achieving this objective has been the relative high cost of the required setup and skilled manpower. Such limitations have prompted the investigation of other non-invasively accessible signals such as the photoplethysmogram (PPG) in relation to FMD....