Sharif Digital Repository

A semi-interpenetrating polymer network (semi-IPN) hydrogel composed of crosslinked chitosan and Polyacrylamide (PAAm) was prepared in the presence of formaldehyde as a crosslinker. The swelling capacity of hydrogel was shown to be affected by the crosslinker and the PAAm/chitosan ratio. The PAAm/chitosan semiIPN hydrogels are swelled at low pHs that attributed to both osmotic pressure and repulsion of -NH3+ groups on chitosan backbones. The swelling of hydrogel in acidic pHs showed that with increasing of chitosan content in the hydrogel, the swelling capacity was increased. But the swelling capacity of hydrogel in neutral pH is reversed, i.e. the higher the PAAm/chitosan ratio, the higher... 

In this work, the modified Flory-Huggins coupled with the free-volume concept and the artificial neural network models were used to obtain the osmotic pressure of aqueous poly(ethylene glycol) solutions. In the artificial neural network, the osmotic pressure of aqueous poly(ethylene glycol) solutions depends on temperature, molecular weight and the mole fractions of poly(ethylene glycol) in aqueous solution. The network topology is optimized and the (3-1-1) architecture is found using optimization of an objective function with batch back propagation (BBP) method for 134 experimental data points. The results obtained from the neural network in obtaining of the osmotic pressure of aqueous... 

In this article, a new group contribution model is suggested for obtaining the thermodynamic properties of biomolecules in aqueous solutions. Accordingly, a Freed-FV model has been applied for the combinatorial free-volume term. The activity coefficients, solubilities, densities, and vapor pressures of amino acids and simple peptides in aqueous solutions were correlated, using the proposed group contribution model. Group interaction parameters of the proposed model were obtained by use of experimental data from amino acids available in the literature. The results demonstrate that the group contribution model can accurately correlate activity coefficient, solubility, density, and vapor... 

Wettability alteration is the principal low-salinity-effect (LSE) in many oil-brine-rock (OBR) systems. Our recent experimental results have demonstrated that wettability alteration by low salinity is slow. It is expected that the electrical behavior of oil/brine and rock/brine interfaces and the water film geometry control both the transient hydrodynamic pressure, and the time-scale of ionic transport in the film, thus the kinetics and degree of wettability alteration. In this paper, the electro-diffusion process induced by the imposed ionic strength gradient is simulated by solving Poisson-Nernst-Planck equations in a water film bound between two charged surfaces, using a finite... 

The slow kinetics of wettability alteration toward a more water-wetting state by low-salinity waterflooding (LSWF) in oil-brine-rock (OBR) systems is conjectured to be pertinent to the electrokinetic phenomena in the thin brine film. We hypothesize that the nanoscale physicochemical heterogeneities such as surface roughness and surface charge heterogeneity at the rock/brine interface control further the dynamics of electrodiffusion and electrostatic disjoining pressure (Πel), thus the time-scale and the magnitude of the low salinity effect (LSE). In this regard, film-scale computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations were performed. The coupled Poisson-Nernst-Planck (PNP) equations were...