Sharif Digital Repository

A low-power technique for high-resolution comparators is introduced. In this technique, p-type metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistors are employed as the input of the latch of the comparator just like the input of the preamplifier. The latch and preamplifier stages are activated in a special pattern using an inverter-based controller. Unlike the conventional comparator, the preamplification delay can be set to an optimum low value even if after the preamplification, the output voltages is less than n-channel metal-oxide semiconductor voltage threshold. As a result, the proposed comparator reduces the power consumption significantly and enhances the speed. The speed and power... 

The development of thin layer structures on flexible current collectors has become as an effective strategy for preparing advanced portable and wearable power sources. Herein, a flexible and efficient electrode was fabricated based on electrospun porous carbon nanofibers (PCNFs) substrate with elaborately designed thin layer Co3V2O8-Ni3V2O8 core–shell nanostructures (Co3V2O8-Ni3V2O8 TLs@PCNFs). The resulting free-standing Co3V2O8-Ni3V2O8 TLs@PCNFs composite was used directly as a flexible electrode in three electrode system for supercapacitor studies without the need for utilization of either binder or metal-based current collector. The unique thin layer structure of Co3V2O8-Ni3V2O8... 

Synthesis of colloidal metal oxides with controllable size and morphology is burgeoning field of research in nanoscience. Low band gap gray Zn/ZnO colloidal nanoparticles were fabricated by plasma-liquid interaction of DC arc discharge in water. Scanning electron microscopy, X-ray diffraction and UV–vis spectroscopy were employed for morphology, crystal structure and optical characterizations respectively. Optical emission spectroscopy was used to investigate the plasma properties during the synthesis and formation mechanism of nanoparticles. Nanoparticles with different size and shape were fabricated only by adjusting discharge current during synthesis without introducing any chemical... 

Transition metal oxides are being more frequently used as hole injection layer (HIL) in organic light emitting diodes (OLEDs), in place of polymer HILs such as PEDOT:PSS. The very thin films of the metal oxide HILs are usually deposited using vapor deposition, in order to create uniform films. Here, we report OLEDs fabricated using solution processed MoOx films as the HIL and super yellow as the emissive layer. The performance of the devices is comparable to PEDOT:PSS based devices, while the stability tests show the lifetime of MoOx-based devices is 4 × 106 h, about 40 times longer than PEDOT:PSS devices, at typical working condition. X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) indicates both... 

Polyaniline/graphene oxide (PANI/GO) co-doped with Zn2+ and Fe3+ was synthesized via a simple and low cost one-step chronoamperometry method on stainless steel (SS) as the substrate. The Fe3+-Zn2+-PANI/GO nanocomposite is characterized using X-ray diffraction as well as Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy, energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy, transmission electron microscopy, and field emission scanning electron microscopy. Also, cyclic voltammetry, galvanostatic charge-discharge, and electrochemical impedance spectroscopy are used to study the electrochemical performance of the as-prepared electrode materials. Significantly, the Fe3+-Zn2+-PANI/GO nanocomposite exhibits a specific... 

Selective catalytic reduction (SCR) of NOx by NH3 over a series of Mn–M/Z catalysts (M = Cr, Mn, Fe, Co, Ni, Cu, Zn, and Z = the ZSM-5 Zeolite) synthesized by wet impregnation method was investigated. Mn–Fe/Z, Mn–Co/Z, and Mn–Cu/Z catalysts exhibited approximately 100 % NOx conversion over a wide temperature range (200–360 °C) in a defined atmospheric condition, which was noticeably greater than that of Mn–Cr/Z (340–360 °C). Furthermore, the effect of addition of second metal oxide species to the initial Mn/Z catalyst on the structure of catalysts was studied by several characterization techniques. BET measurements revealed high surface area and pore volume of the Mn–Cu/Z catalyst. In... 

Nowadays, fossil fuel limitations and environmental concerns push researchers to find clean and renewable energy resources. Solar hydrogen production via water splitting reactions in electrochemical and/or photo-electrochemical systems has been accepted as a promising route and efficient electrocatalysts are involved in both. Here, cobalt nanoflakes with an oxide/hydroxide surface and a conductive metallic core are grown on commercially available steel mesh modified with carbon based nanocomposites as a support layer. The portion of reduced graphene oxide sheets was changed from 0 to 100 wt% and the correlation of this concentration with the surface morphology and electro-catalytic activity... 

Vacuum residue cracking has been successfully conducted under supercritical water condition in presence of various metal oxide nanocalysts, namely NiO, CuO, ZnO, Co2O3, and Cr2O3 synthesized at supercritical water. The cracking experiments were carried out at 450 °C. Three species of cracking: maltene, asphaltene, and coke were then weighed and their corresponding speciation was defined. Gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC–MS), nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy (NMR), thermogravimetric analysis (TGA), and elemental analysis (CHNS) tests were utilized to prove the performance of upgrading reactions. It was revealed that NiO showed the best performance among other catalyst, in which... 

An analysis is presented of the effective electromagnetic parameters of high-permittivity, anisotropic artificial dielectrics which are built by stacking arrays of metallic elements and conventional dielectric films, with adjacent arrays shifted with respect to each other. The effective parameters of the artificial dielectric are extracted from the scattering coefficients of plane electromagnetic waves which are normally or obliquely incident on a slab of the artificial material with finite thickness. These coefficients are derived from the generalised scattering matrix of a single layer of metallic elements which is computed using the integral equation technique. Both two-dimensional and... 

In this study, colloidal tungsten oxide nanoparticles were fabricated by pulsed laser ablation of tungsten target using the first harmonic of a Nd:YAG laser (1064 nm) in deionized water. After ablation, a 0.33 g/lit HAuCl4 aqueous solution was added into as-prepared colloidal nanoparticles. In this process, Au3+ ions were reduced to decorate gold metallic state (Au0) onto colloidal tungsten oxide nanoparticles surface. The morphology and chemical composition of the synthesized nanoparticles were studied by AFM, XRD, TEM and XPS techniques. UV-Vis analysis reveals a distinct absorption peak at ∼530 nm. This peak can be attributed to the surface plasmon resonance (SPR) of Au and confirms... 

Hydrocarbon production decline as a result of formation damage caused by fines migration has been widely observed in laboratory corefloods and natural flows in porous media. Permeability impairment due to fines migration is explained by different capture mechanisms of already released particles at some pore sites. Preventing detachment of in-situ particles from the rock surface during enhanced oil recovery (EOR) agent injection into the porous media has been reported recently. In this experimental study, the effect of five types of metal oxide nanoparticles; γ-AI2O3, ZnO, CuO, MgO and SiO: to adsorb the fine particles existing in the flowing suspension has been investigated. In each test,... 

In this research, the application of equal channel angular extrusion process to produce both the cold-welded and diffusion-bonded Al/Cu bimetallic rods is assessed. The joints shear strength for both of the methods are measured and compared. The microstructure examinations were also carried out using scanning electron microscope equipped with EDX system and x-ray diffraction analysis. The results exhibit that the strength of the bond in cold-welded specimens is dependent on the amount of stretch and pressure at the materials interface. But in the diffusion-bonded specimens, it is depended on the struggle between the oxidation rate of the mating surfaces accompanied by inter-metallic... 

Just a few investigations have been conducted to study the mixed nanofluids(MNs), which contain more than one type of nanoparticles, despite considerable advances in the field of nanofluids thermal conductivity. In present research, by combining different volume fractions of various nanoparticles, the variation of mixed nanofluids thermal conductivity was considered. The mentioned nanofluids have different fabrication cost. First, the effect of each specific nanoparticle presence in the base fluid on the thermal conductivity of nanofluid was surveyed both experimentally and theoretically. Then, the thermal conductivities of two MNs, one consisted of a metallic nanoparticle (high thermal... 

Metal films with a periodic arrangement of cut-through slits are studied to show that artificial surface conductivity is created at the flat interface between the periodic slits and the cover/substrate. The presence of surface conductivity when the periodic structure is modeled by an effective refractive index can describe how non-specular higher diffracted orders affect the specular zeroth diffracted order. The magnitude of this surface conductivity is controlled geometrically. The artificial surface conductivity is pure imaginary and thus reactive if all non-specular orders are evanescent. This is usually the case in the low frequency regime. At higher working frequencies when some... 

This study introduces a new scheme for steganalysis of the least significant bit (LSB) embedding, based on the idea of closure of sets (CoS), which is independent of the type of cover signal, applicable to both spatial and transform domains. The CoS is referred to as some special subsets that could be found in a common space whose elements relate to higher-order statistical properties of the signal. The proposed scheme is used for steganalysis of the LSB steganography of greyscale TIFF and JPEG images and audio signals, employing a set of accurate and monotone features that are extracted based on the CoS definition. It is shown that significant improvement to the detection accuracy in... 

In order to restrain ferroresonance in coupling capacitor voltage transformers (CCVT), two kinds of ferroresonance suppression circuits (FSCs) , are proposed in this paper: the resonant type, the fastsaturation reactor type which are connected to secondary side of CCVTs. Frequency domain analyses, for voltage ratio magnitude, are carried out for CCVTs to obtain preferable FSC. Furthermore, using surge suppressors such as metal oxide varistors (MOV) to improve the performance of the FSCs is investigated. Time domain simulations demonstrate that ferroresonance can be cleared in few cycles in presence of FSCs. The Electromagnetic Transients Program (EMTP) is used for modeling and fine-tuning... 

A mathematical model was developed to describe the performance of nanoparticulate mixed oxide pseudocapacitors based on RuO 2-MO 2 (M being another suitable transition metal) under galvanostatic charge/discharge regime. Both double layer and faradaic processes were taken into account. The effects of the active material's particle size and composition were examined. Furthermore, the influence of discharge current on the extents of double layer and faradaic contributions was analyzed. The model analysis showed that the energy density declined upon increasing the volume fraction of larger particles. © 2008 Springer-Verlag  

The effect of bonding temperature on microstructure of a transient liquid phase (TLP)-bonded GTD-111 nickel base superalloy, using a Ni-Si-B interlayer, was investigated. At low bonding temperatures microstructure of the joint centerline is controlled by B diffusion. However, at high bonding temperature effect of base metal alloying elements on the joint microstructure development was more pronounced. Effects of bonding temperature on the formation of secondary precipitates in diffusion-affected zone and isothermal solidification time were also analyzed. It was found that above a critical temperature, formation of borides in diffusion-affected zone is suppressed and the time required for... 

This paper presents a new scheme for steganalysis of random LSB embedding, capable of applying to any kind of digital signal in both spatial and transform domains. The proposed scheme is based on defining a space whose elements relate to higher-order statistical properties of the signal and looking for special subsets, which we call Closure of Sets (CoS) in this space. We use this scheme for steganalysis of the LSB steganography in grayscale images, employing a vector of five accurate and monotone features. Experimental results show significantly higher accuracy of the proposed scheme, as compared to those reported in the literature, especially in low embedding rates applications. © 2009... 

In this study the influences of predeformation and heat treatment conditions on stress-induced melt activating process (SIMA) of A319 aluminum alloy were investigated. At 30% of predeformation a dominant globular structure of grains was obtained. However, further increasing of the predeformation rate considerably reduced the shape factor. The holding time of 10-15 min at semi-solid temperature of 580 °C was suggested in order to prevent grain growth. Coarsening of the grains by excess time or temperature of heat treatment reduced the tensile strength of the alloy. © 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved