Sharif Digital Repository

We report experimental evidence of Cu surface segregation in Ni/Cu system, during deposition of Ni film onto Cu substrate at room temperature and during heat treatment in vacuum. Auger electron spectroscopy (AES) and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) by Tougaard's analysis results show that surface segregation defeats in competition with increase in Ni thickness and terminates when thickness of Ni increase to more than 4 nm. Surface energy and concentration were calculated using contact angle measurements and the results confirm that segregation reduces the surface energy. Surface segregation during heat treatment at 150–220 °C range as a function of time initially shows linear mass... 

During miscible displacements in fractured porous media, one of the most important factors that plays a significant role in oil production is the matrix-fracture interaction. In this work, a series of hydrocarbon injection experiments have been performed on a fractured glass micromodel that was designed specifically to study matrix-fracture interaction. A high quality image analysis method was used to determine the fluid flow behavior, solvent front movement, and viscous fingering associated with solvent movement in matrix and fractures. Observations showed that in the case of unit viscosity ratio, the injection rate increased the slope of recovery curve and consequently improved the final... 

In this paper, a diffusion-based molecular communication channel between two nano-machines is considered. The effect of the amount of memory on performance is characterized, and a simple memory-limited decoder is proposed; its performance is shown to be close to that of the best possible decoder (without any restrictions on the computational complexity or its functional form), using genie-aided upper bounds. This effect is adapted to the case of Molecular Concentration Shift Keying; it is shown that a four-bit memory achieves nearly the same performance as infinite memory for all of the examples considered. A general class of threshold decoders is considered and shown to be suboptimal for a... 

A high silica CHA-type membrane was synthesized by the in-situ crystallization method on a disk like α-alumina porous support to separate both acid (H2S, CO2) gases from methane. The membrane showed a permeance of 3.39×10-8mol/m2sPa for pure CO2with CO2/CH4 ideal selectivity of 21.6 at 303K and 100kPa pressure difference across the membrane. The membrane was also tested with N2 and O2 pure gases indicating a small O2/N2 selectivity of 1.2-1.4, which shows that this type of membrane is not suitable for O2/N2 separation. The membrane performance was also analyzed by binary (CO2-CH4) and ternary (H2S-CO2-CH4) gas mixtures, with compositions near the real sour natural gas (CO2: 2.13mol%, H2S:... 

Discrete ordinates method relies on approximating the integral term of the transport equation with the aid of quadrature summation rules. These quadratures are usually based on certain assumptions which assure specific symmetry rules and transport/diffusion limits. Generally, these assumptions are not problem-dependent which results in inaccuracies in some instances. Here, various methods have been developed for more accurate estimation of the independent angle in S2 approximation, as it is tightly related to valid estimation of the diffusion coefficient/length. We proposed and examined a method to reduce a complicated problem that usually is consisting many energy groups and discrete... 

Light scattering, porosity, surface area, and morphology of TiO2 working electrode can affect the power conversion efficiency of dye -sensitized solar cells dramatically. Here mesoporous TiO2 microbeads were tested as working electrode in dye-sensitized solar cells based on cobalt tris-bipyridine electrolyte. Power conversion efficiencies up to 6.4% were obtained with D35 dye adsorbed onto the light-scattering microbeads. Electron transport, studied using small light perturbation methods, was found to be significantly faster in the microbead films than in standard mesoporous TiO 2 films. This was attributed to the favorable assembly of nanocrystals in the microbeads, which can increase the... 

A new photocatalyst (Ag-S/PEG/TiO2) was synthesized by adding polyethylene glycol (PEG) to an efficient Ag-S/TiO2 photocatalyst, to obtain a photocatalyst that is highly active under visible light. In addition to Ag-S/PEG/TiO2, Ag-S/TiO2 and pure TiO2 were prepared to compare their properties and activities. Specifically, the morphologies and microstructures of the nanophotocatalysts were characterized by means of powder X-ray diffraction (XRD), N2 adsorption-desorption measurements, scanning electron microscopy (SEM), energy-dispersive X-ray (EDX) microanalysis, transmission electron microscopy (TEM), UV-visible diffuse reflectance spectroscopy (DRS), photoluminescence (PL) spectroscopy,... 

Long-time interaction of dewetting nanodroplets is investigated using a long-wave approximation method. Although three-dimensional (3D) droplets evolution dynamics exhibits qualitative behavior analogous to two-dimensional (2D) dynamics, there is an extensive quantitative difference between them. 3D dynamics is substantially faster than 2D dynamics. This can be related to the larger curvature and, as a consequence, the larger Laplace pressure difference between the droplets in 3D systems. The influence of various chemical heterogeneities on the behavior of droplets has also been studied. In the case of gradient surfaces, it is shown how the gradient direction could change the dynamics. For a... 

We study loop-erased random walk (LERW) on the percolation cluster, with occupation probability p≥pc, in two and three dimensions. We find that the fractal dimensions of LERWp are close to normal LERW in a Euclidean lattice, for all p>pc. However, our results reveal that LERW on critical incipient percolation clusters is fractal with df=1.217±0.002 for d=2 and 1.43±0.02 for d=3, independent of the coordination number of the lattice. These values are consistent with the known values for optimal path exponents in strongly disordered media. We investigate how the behavior of the LERWp crosses over from Euclidean to fractal geometry by gradually decreasing the value of the parameter p from 1 to... 

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... 

A new strategy for enhancing the efficiency of TiO2 dye-sensitized solar cells (DSSCs) by design of a new double-layer film doped with Zn ions, with various morphologies and phase compositions, is reported. X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) revealed that Zn2+ (in the range 0.25-0.1 at.%) was successfully incorporated into the TiO2 lattice without forming secondary phases. X-ray diffraction (XRD) and field emission scanning electron microscope (FE-SEM) analyses showed that the synthesized nanoparticles had nanometer grains with different phase compositions and average crystallite sizes in the range of 8-48 nm, depending upon Zn atomic percentage. UV-vis absorption verified that Zn... 

The rising velocity of air bubbles in surfactant solutions is a sensitive measure for the formation of a dynamic adsorption layer (DAL) at the bubble surface. Due to a certain surface coverage by adsorbed species the bubble surface starts to become immobilized and the rising velocity is retarded. There is a large difference in the retardation effect in presence of the protein β-lactoglobulin (BLG) alone and its mixed solutions with surfactants. In presence of added surfactants BLG forms complexes, which adsorb and retard the bubble rising velocity according to their respective surface activity and adsorption kinetics. While the nonionic surfactant C12DMPO does not show significant increase... 

(ZnO)1-x(CdO)x nanofibers were fabricated via electrospinning of polymer precursor by subsequent annealing in air. Field emission scanning electron microscopy (FESEM) showed the smooth and beadless nanofibers and X-ray diffraction (XRD) and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) showed the ZnO hexagonal and the CdO cubic structure. Diffuse reflectance spectroscopy (DRS) showed the band gap energy reduction by increasing the amount of CdO in (ZnO)1-x(CdO)x nanofibers that resulted in the photocatalytic activity under the visible light for dye degradation. Under the UV light CdO acted as both electron and hole sink in the (ZnO) 1-x(CdO)x nanofibers and a possible photocatalytic activity... 

The effect of temperature, pressure and bonding time on microstructure of temperature gradient transient liquid phase (TGTLP) diffusion bonded Al7075 alloy using liquid gallium interlayer was investigated. The selected bonding method relies on using the minimum amount of liquid gallium on faying surfaces, using a very fast heating rate to reach the joining temperature and imposing a temperature gradient across the bond region. The microstructure of the diffusion bonded joints was evaluated by light optical microscopy, scanning electron microscopy and energy dispersive spectroscopy (EDS). Results show that by increasing the temperature, pressure and time of joining, a more uniform... 

In this study, we explored the growth kinetics of the Al-Fe intermetallic (IM) layer at the joint interface of the St-12/Al-5083 friction stir lap welds during post-weld annealing treatment at 350, 400 and 450 C for 30 to 180 min. Optical microscope (OM), field emission gun scanning electron microscope (FEG-SEM) and transmission electron microscope (TEM) were employed to investigate the structure of the weld zone. The thickness and composition of the IM layers were evaluated using image analysis system and electron back-scatter diffraction (EBSD), respectively. Moreover, kernel average misorientation (KAM) analysis was performed to evaluate the level of stored energy in the as-welded state.... 

TiO2 nanoparticles were synthesized by hydrothermal assisted sol-gel technique. The preparation parameters including pH value, the amount of water, titanium tetra isopropoxide content, temperature and time of hydrothermal process were investigated by Taguchi statistical experiments to determine the influence of synthesizing variables on the optimal conditions and to realize the highest degree of crystallinity or smallest crystallite size. X-ray diffraction (XRD) analysis and direct band gap energy (Eg) values, measured via diffuse reflectance spectra (DRS), proved that all the samples consist of anatase as a unique phase. Transmission electron microscopy (TEM) and specific surface area... 

Aging response of transient liquid phase Nb bearing wrought IN718 nickel base superalloy is studied. The aging behaviour of the joint is influenced by low Nb+Al+Ti content of isothermal solidification zone (ISZ) and formation of Nb-Cr-Mo based boride precipitates in diffusion affected zone (DAZ). It was shown that applying a post-bond heat treatment which was able to eliminate the diffusion induced boride precipitates in DAZ and increase the Nb+Al+Ti content of the ISZ improved the aging response and shear strength of the joint  

This paper investigates the effect of microstructure development on mechanical properties of diffusion brazed IN718 nickel-based superalloy using a Ni-Cr-Si-B-Fe filler metal. The phase transformations during diffusion brazing of IN718/Ni-Cr-Si-B-Fe/IN718, which dictate the microstructure of the bonds are governed by diffusion-induced isothermal solidification, cooling-induced athermal solidification, and diffusion-induced solid-state precipitation. It was found that when partial isothermal solidification occurs at the bonding temperature, the residual liquid is transformed into eutectic-type microconstituents. Considering solute redistribution and segregation behavior of the melting point... 

Free-standing TiO2 nanotube array (TNA) films were fabricated via two-step anodization of a titanium sheet. The X-ray diffraction pattern indicated amorphous TNAs were transformed into anatase after annealing the films at 500 °C in air. The surface of TNA was modified by a sequential-chemical bath deposition (S-CBD) method to fabricate Ag2S nanoparticles and forming TNA/Ag2S-n nanostructure, by varying the number of cycles (n). Based on SEM observations, the produced films consisted of vertically ordered tubular structure arrays, each with 125 nm in diameter and 4.1 μm in length containing silver sulphide nanoparticles of ∼12 nm diameter. X-Ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) confirmed the... 

This paper deals with the mixed convective heat transfer of nanofluids through a concentric vertical annulus. Because of the non-adherence of the fluid-solid interface in the presence of nanoparticle migrations, known as slip condition, the Navier's slip boundary condition was considered at the pipe walls. The employed model for nanofluid includes the modified two-component four-equation non-homogeneous equilibrium model that fully accounts for the effects of nanoparticles volume fraction distribution. Assuming the fully developed flow and heat transfer, the basic partial differential equations including continuity, momentum, and energy equations have been reduced to two-point ordinary...