Sharif Digital Repository

Aggressive driving has emerged as one of the most studied behaviors in the traffic safety field, due to its association with the odds of motor vehicle crashes and especially fatal crashes. Previous research has investigated the situations which provoke anger while driving, as well as the emotional (anger) and behavioral (aggression) aspects of aggressive driving. However, surprisingly the cognitive aspects of aggressive driving have largely been neglected. This study investigated the psychometric properties of the short-forms of the Driver's Angry Thoughts Questionnaire (DATQ) and the Driving Anger Expression Inventory (DAX) in a sample of professional drivers. Furthermore, the study aimed... 

Crash forecasting enables safety planners to take appropriate actions before casualty or loss occurs. Identifying and analyzing the attributes influencing forecasting accuracy is of great importance in road crash forecasting. This study aims to model the forecasting accuracy of 31 provinces using their macroeconomic variables and road traffic indicators. Iran's road crashes throughout 2011–2018 are calibrated and cross-validated using the Holt-Winters (HW) forecasting method. The sensitivity of crash forecast reliability is studied by a regression model. The results suggested that the root mean square error (RMSE) of crash prediction increased among the provinces with higher and more variant... 

Triboelectric nanogenerators (TENG) have rapidly advanced in self-powered sensing in transportation engineering owing to its great sensitivity, high energy harvesting performance, simple structures, and low cost. TENG can be used to improve walker and car safety, detect driver fatigue, assess traffic conditions, and extend the useful life of roads. However, collecting sufficient energy have become a significant issue, limiting the lifespan of such self-powered sensors. A new generation of self-powered sensors bridges the gap between the energy acquired and the energy needed for sensing, computing, storage, and transmission. This article provides an overview of the recent progress of TENG... 

The growth of process industries has escalated the probability of loss containment scenarios of hazardous materials that can be tackled via process safety schemes. For preliminary design stage, the inherent scheme is more promising to generate sustainable process designs. For this purpose, various process routes are typically compared to recognize the safer one via numerous indexing methods to eliminate routes with hazardous materials. However, these indices lack in accommodating the equipment characteristics and the underutilization of process and chemical characteristics. Specifically for chemical characteristics, the toxicity aspect has not been engaged for process route selection in... 

The global COVID-19 pandemic has affected the world’s population by causing changes in behavior, such as social distancing, masking, restricting people’s movement, and evaluating existing medication as potential therapies. Many pre-existing medications such as tocilizumab, ivermectin, colchicine, interferon, and steroids have been evaluated for being repurposed to use for the treatment of COVID-19. None of these agents have been effective except for steroids and, to a lesser degree, tocilizumab. Ivermectin has been one of the suggested repurposed medications which exhibit an in vitro inhibitory activity on SARS-CoV-2 replication. The most recommended dose of ivermectin for the treatment of... 

Wearable robots are becoming increasingly practical to use to rehabilitate wounded parts of the body as the number of injuries to the hand, particularly fingers, has increased. Wearable robots are designed to help people save time and money. This exoskeleton is intended to rehabilitate the thumb such that it may do an opposing movement with one Degree Of Freedom (DOF) and a cable system. Two drums, one on the thumb and the other on the tip of the assistive finger place the cables, which feature a cable adjusting screw that can be adjusted for fingers of various lengths. To choose the assistive finger from 4 intact fingers, the two perspectives of the cable length changes and finger forces... 

The demand and importance of fairness creams as a major cosmetic have increased significantly in recent years. However, some of these cosmetics contain heavy metals, hydroquinone and microorganism that can cause various health problems. Therefore, the aim of this study is to determine and examine the concentration of metals (i.e. Cd, Pb, Cr, Ni, Zn, Hg), hydroquinone and microorganisms in nine different fairness creams produced by local and international brands. The health risk assessment of the tested substances for consumers was accessed through systemic exposure dosage (SED), margin of safety (MoS), lifetime cancer risk (LCR), hazard quotient (HQ) and hazard index (HI). The concentration... 

Natural soils contain a certain amount of salt in the form of dissolved ions or electrically charged atoms, originated from the long-term erosion by acidic rainwater. The dissolved salt poses an extra osmotic water potential being normally neglected in laboratory measurements and numerical analyses. However, ignorance of salinity may result in overestimation of stability, and the design may not be as conservative as thought. Therefore, this research aims to first experimentally examine the influence of pore water salinity on water retention curve and saturated permeability of natural dispersive loess under saline and desalinated conditions. Second, the measured parameters are used for... 

Objective(s): Bioresorbable scaffolds have been advocated as the new generation in interventional cardiology because they could provide temporary scaffolds and then disappear with resorption. Although, the available stents in clinical trials exhibited biosafety, efficacy, no death, and no apparent thrombosis, Mg-substrate degradation on drug release has not been investigated. Materials and Methods: Therefore, more research has been needed to legitimize the replacement of current stents with Mg-based stents. UV-Vis spectrophotometer, scanning electron microscope (SEM), X-ray diffraction (XRD), pH measurement, H2 evolution, and corrosion tests determined the change in hybrid properties and... 

Vehicle speed control is one of the most important factors at increasing safety, reducing the number and severity of road accidents. Also, other factors such as inappropriate designing, the overuse of speed bumps, nonconformity to the prevailing standards of the world in construction, maintenance, and repair of roads can cause damage to the car suspension and consequently brings the discomfort of car occupants when crossing the actual road under different driving conditions (various speeds and maneuvers). In the present paper, the effect of different vehicle velocities on the comfort of occupants was investigated empirically. To this end, a passenger vehicle was driven at different constant... 

Seismic performance of postmainshock buildings considering seismic mainshock-aftershock sequences are studied. The case studies correspond to three SAC steel MRF buildings of three, nine and twenty stories. The 2-D models are able to capture important properties of deterioration of strength and stiffness. Endurance time method is used to predict the response of structures in different hazard levels. Results are compared with those from of nonlinear incremental dynamic analysis. Maximum dynamic seismic responses of structures are captured during synthetic mainshock-aftershock seismic sequences which are produced by endurance time method. Interactional-conceptual curves for different seismic... 

In this study, an integrated 2D numerical model is applied to investigate the mechanical effects of the vegetation and soil type on slope stability. The developed model can assess the mechanical aspects of vegetation in slope stabilization. For this purpose, a case study of the Kheyrud forest located in northern Iran is considered as a real case site. Different scenarios including; three soil types (fine grain with low-, medium-, and high-strength) and two vegetation types (Maple and Common-ash) are assessed in the stability analysis (based on safety factor). The results confirm that the considered vegetation can prevent shallow landslide occasions, but has a limited impact on deep landslide... 

The stability of unsaturated slopes under seismic loading has become an important issue over the past few years which is the indication of its practical significance in geoengineering. This study aims at exploring the seismic stability of unsaturated sandy clay and silty clayey sand slopes using 2D limit equilibrium analysis for different slope geometries and ground water levels. To this end, the pseudo-static and the displacement-based sliding block Newmark’s approaches are employed for parametric studies by considering the records of the 2003 earthquake that devastated the city of Bam, in the southeast of Iran. In all analyses, the unsaturated state of the soil materials is taken into... 

Conic shell structures are widely used in aerospace industries. In the literature various models have been proposed to failure analysis of composite materials. Clearly, each model has a favorable range of applications. In this paper tensile, compressive, shear and thermal expansion properties of tape-wounded Carbon/Phenolic composites are firstly measured at various temperatures in range 23–200°C. The captured properties are then taken into account to progressive failure analysis of a conic Carbon/Phenolic structure under internal pressure and thermal loadings. For this end, a particular failure criterion is proposed to predict failure in the composite structures with a reasonable margin of... 

This paper presents a probabilistic approach to reveal the negative consequences of overlooking code calibration when adopting the provisions of nonindigenous building codes in design. A taxonomy of the national building codes of various countries whose provisions are adopted from one or more original standards is first presented. Next, the reliability-based approach to quantify the lack of safety that may arise due to the absence of code calibration is presented. This approach is then applied to the case study of the National Building Code of Iran, whose load and resistance factors are directly adopted from ASCE/SEI 7. To this end, seven steel building archetypes with various structural... 

Passenger Vehicle Type Choice (PVTC) has an undeniable impact on crash severity and costs. To estimate that, one must carefully consider subjective factors as well as objective ones. Ignoring the role of subjective variables can cause bias in the estimation of the effective variables' coefficients. The present paper investigates the impact of safety attitude, transportation attitude, and lifestyle on PVTC in a bi-level structure. To do so, we used the data from 633 face-to-face interviews conducted in Iran. The passenger vehicles investigated in this study are divided into five categories according to their weight and safety performance: mini, compact, medium, large, and sport utility... 

In recent years, researchers have paid particular attention to safety, air pollution, and energy consumption, which are all affected by vehicle type. The primary objective of this study is to achieve a thorough understanding of the relationships of transportation attitudes, safety attitudes, personality, and lifestyle with vehicle type for the first time in Iran, as a developing country. For this purpose, an interview questionnaire was designed, and 740 participants were interviewed in Tehran. Vehicle types are categorized into seven groups: mini, compact, medium, heavy, Sport Utility Vehicle (SUV), pickup, and motorcycle. In the first stage, factor analysis was employed to identify the... 

In this study, a general 3D distributed modeling of Trolling-Mode AFM (TR-AFM) as a nanorobot is presented to analyze the 2D manipulation process of a spherical cell. To this aim, the analysis is categorized into 3 sections. In the first section, 6 deformations of TR-AFM are taken into account, and the standard model of the system is obtained. Moreover, the system is simulated in ANSYS Workbench. The results of modal and transient analyses of the system from both analytical and software methods reveal high agreement, which confirms the accuracy of the presented analytical model. In the second section, by utilizing the 3D derived model, displacement of a spherical yeast single cell (W303)... 

The ultimate purpose of the nuclear power plant safety is to protect the public and the environment from unacceptable radiation exposure in all operational states. This paper presents a novel severe accident management framework to cope with the risk of radioactive material release to the environment. The objective is to reduce the contribution of severe accidents to the large and early release frequencies of radioactive materials for a VVER-1000 nuclear reactor. The proposed approach includes the emergency actions of NPP personnel aiming to recover the lost alternating power and restore the core cooling process by all means available at the site. In addition, mobile equipment including a... 

Flammability limits are important safety parameters of each flammable material. Thermal theory of flame propagation suggests existence of a threshold temperature above which a flame propagates. Density theory of flame propagation suggests existence of a threshold density factor above which a flame propagates; density factor is defined as the ratio of before ignition to after ignition density. Based on a general version of thermal theory of flame propagation, constancy of values of adiabatic flame temperature at each flammability limit can be used to predict flammability limits. Similarly, based on a general version of the density theory of flame propagation, constancy of values of density...