Sharif Digital Repository

Watermelon seed oil characteristics were evaluated to determine whether this oil could be exploited as an edible oil. Hexane extraction of watermelon seeds produced yields of 50% (w/w) oil. The refractive index, saponification and iodine value were 1.4712 (at 25 °C), 200 mg KOH/g and 156 g I/100 g, respectively. The acid and peroxide values were 2.4 mg KOH/g and 3.24 mequiv/kg, respectively. The induction time of the oil was also 5.14 h at 110 °C, which was measured for the first time. Total unsaturation contents of the oil was 81.6%, with linoleic acid (18:2) being the dominant fatty acid (68.3%). Considering that the watermelon seed oil was highly unsaturated, the relatively high induction... 

Afacile, seed-less and one-pot method was developed for synthesis of gold nanoflowers with multiple tips through reduction of HAuCl4 with deep eutectic solvent at room temperature. This solvent is ecofriendly, low-cost, non-toxic and biodegradable and can act as both reducing and shape-controlling agent. In this protocol, highly branched and stable gold nanoflowers were obtained without using any capping agent. The obtained products were characterized by different techniques including, field emission scanning electron microscopy, transmission electron microscopy, x-ray diffraction andUV-vis spectroscopy. The as-prepared gold nanoflowers exhibit efficient surface-enhanced Raman scattering... 

In this study the effect of different nitrogen source substrates on the amount of chitosan production by Aspergillus niger was investigated. A. niger PTCC 5012 from the Persian Type Culture Collection (PTCC) was grown on soy bean, corn seed and canola residues at 30 °C for specified cultivation days under sterilized conditions. Chitosan was extracted from the fungal mycelia using hot alkaline and acid treatment. The results were shown that soy bean residue at moisture of 37% and 8.4 ± 0.26 % of nitrogen content produced the highest amount of chitosan (17.053 ± 0.95 g/kg of dry substrate), after 12 days of incubation. Corn seed residue produced very low amount of chitosan (1.9 ± 0.4 % of... 

Pyrochlore free (x)PMN-(1 - x)PZT ceramics were synthesized successfully by a seeding method. In this method, the mixture of PbO, MgO and Nb2O5 was added to the prepared PZT sol to from PMN-PZT gel. The gel was fired to vaporize the organic contents of gel and obtain powder. Two-step sintering process was used to produce pyrochlore free ceramics. The samples produced by this method showed higher relative densities, lower sintering temperature and higher dielectric properties relative to the mixed oxide method, mostly due to the higher homogeneity of the prepared powder. The measured dielectric properties of PZT-rich and PMN-rich materials were high while the other samples exhibited low... 

Fault coverage and test time have important roles in using Built in self-test (BIST). Two parameters are crucial and effective in BIST design: LFSR's polynomial (or configuration) and its initial seed. In this paper we propos a practical method for finding near optimal LFSR with genetic algorithm (GA) and show that LFSR is a good TPG compared with other TPGs. In this method, the candidate seeds are achieved through a deterministic approach, and an evolutionary approach is employed to obtain the LFSR configurations for the desired fault coverage under test time constraint. The configurations are encoded in binary chromosomes. The evolution process evolves the fittest configurations to achieve... 

The effect of α-Al 2O 3 seeds and MgO on the densification behavior and microstructure of the nanocrystalline γ-Al 2O 3 powder was investigated. The required α-Al 2O 3 seeds were produced by 'autogenous seeding' where the seeds were obtained by calcination of the initial nanosized γ-Al 2O 3 powders above its transformation temperature and incorporated into γ-Al 2O 3 matrix. The seeds were characterized by means of laser particle size analyzer, X-ray diffraction, and Brunauer-Emmett-Teller surface analyzer. The simultaneous influence of α-Al 2O 3 seeds and MgO on γ-Al 2O 3 behavior was evaluated by differential thermal analysis, densitometry, and electron microscopy. The results showed that... 

In this paper, we present a new and fast algorithm for generating the seeds set for web crawlers. A typical crawler normally starts from a fixed set like DMOZ links, and then continues crawling from URLs found in these web pages. Crawlers are supposed to download more good pages in less iterations. Crawled pages are good if they have high PageRanks and are from different communities. In this paper, we present a new algorithm with O(n) running time for generating crawler's seeds set based on HITS algorithm. A crawler can download qualified web pages, from different communities, starting from generated seeds set using our algorithm in less iteration  

This paper presents a neural network-based method for automatic classification of magnetic resonance images (MRI) of brain under three categories of normal, lesion benign, and malignant. The proposed technique consists of six subsequent stages; namely, preprocessing, seeded region growing segmentation, connected component labeling (CCL), feature extraction, feature Dimension Reduction, and classification. In the preprocessing stage, the enhancement and restoration techniques are used to provide a more appropriate image for the subsequent automated stages. In the second stage, the seeded region growing segmentation is used for partitioning the image into meaningful regions. In the third... 

This research effort attempts to investigate the conditions under whichbetter variance reduction can be achieved in simulation of a system where randomdeviates are generated by the acceptance-rejection technique. To inducecorrelation among the generated deviates, both antithetic and stratifiedsampling will be considered to study the magnitude of variance reduction inestimating the renewal function for a single component replacement process withGamma distributed life. The negative exponential and the Cheng envelopingfunctions will be considered and all four combinations of correlationinduction-enveloping function will be tested. We will propose the correctapproach in incorporating streams of... 

Social networks and the shared data in these networks are always considered as good opportunities in hands of the attackers. To evaluate the privacy risks in these networks and challenge the anonymization techniques, several de-anonymization attacks have been introduced so far. In this paper, we propose a technique to improve the success rate of passive seed based de-anonymization attacks. Our proposed technique is simple and can be applied in combination with different types of de-anonymization attacks. We show that it can achieve high success rates with low number of seeds compared to similar attacks. Our technique can also be used for applying partial attacks on graphs which results in... 

Application of the fiber contained fluids has been extensively increased in many industries. In the petroleum industry, fibrous fluids are utilized for different applications. For instance, they have been applied in drilling operations for hole cleaning and cutting removal. In this article, the results of the studies performed on the application of Hydrated Basil Seeds (HBS) as the herbal eco-friendly fiber on hole cleaning and filtration control were presented. In order to investigate the application of HBS on hole cleaning, Polyacrylamide (PA) was added to the pure water to provide the base fluid and HBS at different concentrations were suspended in the base fluid and the effect of HBS on... 

In this work Halloysite nanotubes were used to synthesis a series of modified acrylamide/Quince seeds-based hydrogels (Poly (AAm-co-QS)/Haln). The as-prepared Poly (AAm-co-QS)/Haln hydrogels displayed improved performance as adsorbent in elimination of methylene blue (MB) from aqueous solution. The structures of the prepared Poly (AAm-co-QS)/Haln hydrogels were identified by XRD, FT-IR, FE-SEM, BET, TGA and EDX. Effect of pH value on the swelling behavior and dye adsorption performance of as-prepared hydrogels was explored. The adsorption MB results suggested that the adsorption kinetics fitted the pseudo-second-order model. The adsorption experiments at various pH condition indicated that... 

In this study, PZT-PCN ceramic was made via sol–gel seeding method and effects of conventional sintering (CS) as well as two-step sintering (TSS) were investigated on microstructure, phase formation, density, dielectric and piezoelectric properties. First, high quality powder was achieved by seeding method in which the mixture of Co3O4 and Nb2O5 powder was added to the prepared PZT sol to form PZT-PCN gel. After drying and calcination, pyrochlore free PZT-PCN powder was synthesized. Second, CS and TSS were applied to achieve dense ceramic. The optimum temperature used for 2 h of conventional sintering was obtained at 1150 °C; finally, undesired ZrO2 phase formed in CS procedure was removed... 

Poly(butadiene-stat-styrene)/poly(methylmetacrylate), SBR/PMMA, structural latices were synthesized by using equal moles of different kinds of surfactants: anionic, nonionic, and anionic/nonionic mixture in a two-stage emulsion polymerization. The results indicate that the application of anionic surfactants for the first stage, accompanying sodium persulfate initiator, KPS, for both stages led to core/shell and raspberry morphologies depended upon the hydrophilic lipophilic balance (HLB) of the surfactant. On the other hand, a core/shell structure was observed for structural latices which were synthesized via application of nonionic or anionic/non-ionic mixed surfactants along with...