Sharif Digital Repository

An operationally simple and entirely green protocol for heteropoly acid catalyst conjugate addition of indoles and pyrrole to unsaturated carbonyl compounds and nitro-alkene in water was investigated. It is important that the products arising from 1,2-addition were not observed under the reaction conditions. Pyrroles also readily underwent Michael addition at Α-positions under the same reaction conditions. Indole and many of its derivatives are present in many substances commonly found in nature. Micheal addition reactions are performed in organic solvents with the reactions in water are relatively scarce. The Michael addition between indole and methyl vinyl ketone in the presence of... 

We study Hydrogen sulfide gas detection properties of pure and 1% copper oxide added WO3 thin films. The spin coated deposits on alumina substrates were annealed at 500 C for 1 hour in order to improve the crystallinity of the films. The sensitivity of pure tungsten oxide is poor even at temperatures of about 100 C but the doped samples exhibit good response to H2S gas. Our data show sensitivity of about 1500 in 10 ppm diluted gas in air at 100 C. The films are sensitive to the gas even at 250 ppb (sensitivity about 2) H2S concentration at 100 C but with rather long recovery time. Crystal structure, morphology and chemical composition of samples were studied by X-Ray diffraction (XRD),... 

In this paper, at first the stability condition which gives an upper stochastic bound for a class of Stochastic Hybrid Systems (SHS) with deterministic jumps is derived. Here, additive noise signals are considered that do not vanish at equilibrium points. The presented theorem gives an upper bound for the second stochastic moment or variance of the system trajectories. Then, the linear case of SHS is investigated to show the application of the theorem. For the linear case of such stochastic hybrid systems, the stability criterion is obtained in terms of Linear Matrix Inequality (LMI) and an upper bound on state covariance is obtained for them. Then utilizing the stability theorem, an output... 

To achieve high rate of data transfer, tape mechanisms must be able to transport the tape with a constant velocity for scanning. During this process, it is desired to make the rise time minimized without timing and data transfer errors. In this paper, three servo systems including the take-up and supply reel servos for tape tension control and capstan servo for speed control are considered. So, tape transport mechanisms can be described with a nonlinear multi-input multi-output system (MIMO). After state-space representation of the problem, feedback control is designed for tracking objective. It should be mentioned that an increase in the speed of time response of system corresponds to an... 

The crystal and electronic structures of normal phase of Ba1-xKxFe2As2 for x = 0.0, 0.5 and 1.0 have been studied by using pseudopotential Quantum Espresso code based on ab-initio density functional theory. Effects of K doping on the crystal structure and lattice parameters have been calculated and compared with the experimental and computational reported data for similar compounds. The metal-metal bonding scenario was used to explain the changes of lattice parameters by K doping. The electronic structure of this system including of density of states and band structure have been calculated and investigated by K doping. One of the interesting results is that a larger peak is appeared near the... 

We consider a multi-objective linear programming model with type-2 fuzzy objectives. The considered model has the flexibility for the user to specify the more general membership functions for objectives to reflect the inherent fuzziness, while being simple and practical. We develop two solution strategies with reasonable computing costs. The additional cost, as compared to the type-1 fuzzy model, is indeed insignificant. These two algorithms compute Pareto optimal solutions of the type-2 problems, one being based on a maxmin approach and the other on aggregating the objectives. Finally, applying the proposed algorithms, we work out two illustrative examples  

Gas injection into reservoirs can be used to increase oil recovery. However, reservoir heterogeneity and high gas mobility reduce sweep efficiency and decrease recovery. Using foam can reduce gas mobility and therefore increase sweep efficiency. Foam is thermodynamically unstable, so it is important to predict the foam stability. In order to understand the influence of oil presence on foam stability, static experiments performed on foam by varying the type and amount of added oil and molecular weight of added alkane. Also static foam properties have been investigated by varying the surfactant concentration, ionic strength, composition of different salts in the sample, and addition of polymer... 

In past decades, many attempts have been made to use water-soluble polymers as a mobility control agent to improve sweep efficiency of enhanced oil recovery processes. However, sensitivity of the thickening behavior of these polymers to some harsh conditions, such as high salinity, has cast serious doubt on their applicability in reservoir conditions. By expansion of nanotechnology, scientists discovered that nanoparticles can be utilized as thickening and rheology control agents in many polymer solutions. In this study, hydrophilic fumed silica is added to hydrolyzed polyacrylamide and sulfonated polyacrylamide solutions. The effect of the addition of nano silica on the thickening and... 

A reduction in catalyst's activity with time-on-stream and the formation of side products are two of the problems associated with catalytic propane dehydrogenation (PDH). Previous studies have indicated that the presence of small amounts of oxygenated additives such as water can reduce coke formation and enhance catalyst activity. The aim of the present work was to develop an appropriate kinetic model for PDH over a commercial Pt-Sn/γ-Al 2O3 catalyst in the presence of small amounts of water. Experimental data were obtained from a previous study where catalytic PDH was carried out in a bench scale reactor system at atmospheric pressure in the temperature range of 575-620°C in the presence of... 

Recent studies have revealed that spectrum congestion is due to the inefficient usage of spectrum against the availability. Cognitive radio is viewed as an approach for improving the utilisation of radio spectrum. The spectrally encoded (spread-time) code-division multiple access (SE-CDMA) technique (which is regarded as the dual of spread spectrum CDMA) is considered and its performance in cognitive radio networks is studied. In cognitive network spectrum, overlay and underlay techniques are employed to enable the primary and secondary users to coexist while improving the overall spectrum efficiency. It is shown that SE-CDMA provides considerable flexibility to design overlay and underlay... 

In the present work, the interaction of hydrogen molecules with defective graphene structures doped by transition metal (TM) atoms is investigated by using first principles density functional theory (DFT). Defective graphene structures include Stone-Wales (SW), 585 and 555-777 and transition metals include early TMs, i.e. scandium (Sc), titanium (Ti) and vanadium (V). It is found that in comparison with the pristine graphene, presence of defects significantly enhances the metal binding. Among three defects, 585 divacancy leads to the strongest binding between graphene and metal. Hydrogen adsorption is then evaluated by sequential addition of hydrogen molecules to the system. The results... 

This paper studies denoising of images contaminated with additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN). In recent years, clustering-based methods have shown promising performances. In this paper we show that low-rank subspace clustering provides a suitable clustering problem that minimizes the lower bound on the MSE of the denoising, which is optimum for Gaussian noise. Solving the corresponding clustering problem is not easy. We study some global and local sub-optimal solutions already presented in the literature and show that those that solve a better approximation of our problem result in better performances. A simple image denoising method based on dictionary learning using the idea of... 

In this paper, we study a variant of the well-known line-simplification problem. For this problem, we are given a polygonal path P=p1, p2,...,pn and a set S of m point obstacles in the plane, with the goal being to determine an optimal homotopic simplification of P. This means finding a minimum subsequence Q=q1,q2,..., qk (q1=p1 and qk=pn) of P that approximates P within a given error ε that is also homotopic to P. In this context, the error is defined under a distance function that can be a Hausdorff or Fréchet distance function, sometimes referred to as the error measure. In this paper, we present the first polynomial-time algorithm that computes an optimal homotopic simplification of P in... 

We consider a two-user state-dependent generalized multiple access channel (GMAC) with correlated channel state information (CSI). It is assumed that the CSI is partially known at each encoder noncausally. We first present an achievable rate region using multi-layer Gelfand-Pinsker coding with partial state and message cooperation between the encoders. We then specialize our result to a Gaussian GMAC with additive interferences that are known partially at each encoder. We show that the proposed scheme can remove the common part known at both encoders and also mitigate a significant part of the independent interference via state cooperation when the feedback links are strong. Thus, the... 

The authors study a two-user state-dependent generalised multiple-access channel (GMAC) with correlated states. It is assumed that each encoder has 'non-causal' access to channel state information (CSI). They develop an achievable rate region by employing rate-splitting, block Markov encoding, Gelfand-Pinsker multicoding, superposition coding and joint typicality decoding. In the proposed scheme, the encoders use a partial decoding strategy to collaborate in the next block, and the receiver uses a backward decoding strategy with joint unique decoding at each stage. The author's achievable rate region includes several previously known regions proposed in the literature for different scenarios... 

Noise reduction of speech signals plays an important role in telecommunication systems. Various types of speech additive noise can be introduced such as babble, crowd, large city, and highway which are the main factor of degradation in perceived speech quality. There are some cases on the receiver side of telecommunication systems, where the direct value of interfering noise is not available and there is just access to noisy speech. In these cases the noise cannot be cancelled totally but it may be possible to reduce the noise in a sensible way by utilizing the statistics of the noise and speech signal. In this paper the proposed method for noise reduction is Bayesian recursive state-space... 

In this paper, we study transmission of a memoryless Laplacian source over three types of channels: additive white Laplacian noise (AWLN), additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN), and slow flat-fading Rayleigh channels under both bandwidth compression and bandwidth expansion. For this purpose, we analyze two well-known hybrid digital-analog (HDA) joint source-channel coding schemes for bandwidth compression and one for bandwidth expansion. Then we obtain achievable (absolute-error) distortion regions of the HDA schemes for the matched signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) case as well as the mismatched SNR scenario. Using numerical examples, it is shown that these schemes can achieve a distortion very... 

In this study, TiO 2-SiO 2 nanocomposite films with different amounts of SiO 2 were prepared by sol-gel process and were coated onto stainless steel 316L. The effect of addition of various amount of SiO 2 in the precursor solution on the photocatalysis, photo-generated hydrophilicity and self-cleaning property of TiO 2 thin films was investigated by X-ray diffraction, Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy, water contact angle measurements and UV spectroscopy. In the tested ranges of SiO 2 content and sintering temperature, the highest photocatalytic activity and self-cleaning property were observed in the 15 mol% SiO 2 sample sintered at 750 °C. Addition of less than 30 mol% SiO 2 had a... 

In this article, satisfying the second law of thermodynamics, we present a 3D constitutive model for shape memory polymers. The model is based on an additive decomposition of the strain into four parts. Also, evolution laws for internal variables during both cooling and heating processes are proposed. Since temperature has considerable effect on the shape memory polymer behavior, for simulation of a shape memory polymer-based structure, it is required to perform a heat-transfer analysis. Commonly, an experimentally observed temperature rate-dependent behavior of shape memory polymers is justified by a rate-dependent glassy temperature, but using the heat-transfer analysis, it is shown that... 

Multi-walled carbon nanotubes (MWCNTs) with diameter of about 50 nm were synthesized using thermal chemical vapor deposition. We have investigated the influence of Mg doping to the MWCNTs on its hydrogen storage property. TEM micrographs showed that Mg was attached to the MWCNTs and discontinuous arrangement of the carbon walls was recognized in the MWCNTs. According to XPS and BET analyses, the surface functional groups and pore size of the Mg-MWCNTs are increased by interactions between the Mg and the MWCNT's outer walls. The electrochemical discharging curves of the MWCNTs and Mg-doped MWCNTs revealed that the hydrogen storage capacity was 363 and 450 mAhg -1, respectively. Volumetric...