Sharif Digital Repository

The COVID-19 outbreak has triggered a massive research, but still urgent detection and treatment of this virus seems a public concern. The spread of viruses in aqueous environments underlined efficient virus treatment processes as a hot challenge. This review critically and comprehensively enables identifying and classifying advanced biochemical, membrane-based and disinfection processes for effective treatment of virus-contaminated water and wastewater. Understanding the functions of individual and combined/multi-stage processes in terms of manufacturing and economical parameters makes this contribution a different story from available review papers. Moreover, this review discusses... 

Polyphenol-based materials have attracted wide-spread interest from academic and industrial communities because of their unique structure and physicochemical properties. Tannic acid (TA), as a polyphenolic phytochemical with high level of galloyl groups, interacts with various substances (proteins, polysaccharides, and metals) through several modes including hydrogen bonding, hydrophobic and electrostatic interactions. Such hybrid or hybrid-like systems allow the preparation of various advanced materials with promising applications in medicine. In this review, we highlight the recent advances of TA-incorporated materials in medical applications including drug delivery, tissue engineering,... 

Liquefaction-induced lateral spreading caused severe damages to pile foundations during past earthquakes. Micropiles can be used as a mitigation strategy against lateral spreading e ects on pile foundations. However, the available knowledge about the possible efficiency of this strategy is quite limited. In this regard, the present study aims to evaluate the e ectiveness of a vertical micropile system as a lateral spreading countermeasure using large-scale 1 g shake table tests on 3 x 3 pile groups. The results showed that the micropile system was not able to e ectively reduce the bending moments in piles; however, it considerably reduced the lateral soil pressures exerted on the upslope... 

The reliability of power electronic based converters has become increasingly important due to their wide-spread use in industry. An effective method to increase the availability of converters is to use condition monitoring systems for planning scheduled maintenances. This paper provides a method to monitor the condition of IGBTs in a back-to-back converter based on their on-state voltage measurement. Using the proposed system adds limited number of elements to the circuit but can be implemented independent from the converter. Considering the converter topology has made the proposed method applicable for condition monitoring of switches in different back-to-back converters. This advantage... 

The effects of liquefaction induced lateral spreading on the piles of a dolphin-type berth were investigated using 1 g large scale shake table testing accompanied by numerical simulations. For this purpose, various aspects of the response of the soil and the pile group to lateral spreading were considered. The results indicated that large bending moments were induced in the piles during lateral spreading and the downslope piles of the group received greater bending moments than the upslope one. The monotonic components of bending moments in the piles were reasonably predicted by the displacement based numerical approach using p-y springs when they were properly tuned for strength reduction... 

Market practitioners and speculators attempt to make benefits from the existence of market price gaps and profit opportunities by arbitrage strategies. Although some investors trade stocks based on the available financial and fundamental information of a particular share, there are others who make profits by risk hedging and swing trading opportunities. One of these strategies is pairs trading, which is a sub-category of statistical arbitrage. Pairs trading can assure reasonably a risk-free profit gaining. This paper aims to make a hypothetical portfolio composed of pairs of stocks by exploring a significant association between their prices in the Toronto Stock Exchange, TSX. We compare the... 

Nonpharmaceutical measures such as social distancing can play an important role in controlling the spread of an epidemic. In this paper, we use a mathematical model combining human mobility and disease spreading. For the mobility dynamics, we design an agent-based model consisting of pedestrian dynamics with a novel type of force to resemble social distancing in crowded sites. For the spreading dynamics, we consider the compartmental susceptible-exposed-infective (SEI) dynamics plus an indirect transmission with the footprints of the infectious pedestrians being the contagion factor. We show that the increase in the intensity of social distancing has a significant effect on the exposure... 

A probabilistic method is proposed in this study to predict the spreading profile of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) in the United State (US) via time-variant reliability analysis. To this end, an extended susceptible-exposed-infected-vaccinated-recovered (SEIVR) epidemic model is first established deterministically, considering the quarantine and vaccination effects, and then applied to the available COVID-19 data from US. Afterwards, the prediction results are described as a time-series of the number of people infected, recovered, and dead. Upon introducing the extended SEIVR model into a limit-state function and defining the model parameters including transmission, recovery, and... 

For a graph G, let (Formula presented.) denote its second smallest Laplacian eigenvalue. It was conjectured that (Formula presented.), where (Formula presented.) is the complement of G. In this paper, it is shown that (Formula presented.). © 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group  

For a graph G, let (Formula presented.) denote its second smallest Laplacian eigenvalue. It was conjectured that (Formula presented.), where (Formula presented.) is the complement of G. In this paper, it is shown that (Formula presented.). © 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group  

The disasters caused by epidemic outbreaks is different from other disasters due to two specific features: their long-term disruption and their increasing propagation. Not controlling such disasters brings about severe disruptions in the supply chains and communities and, thereby, irreparable losses will come into play. Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is one of these disasters that has caused severe disruptions across the world and in many supply chains, particularly in the healthcare supply chain. Therefore, this paper, for the first time, develops a practical decision support system based on physicians' knowledge and fuzzy inference system (FIS) in order to help with the demand... 

In this study, the impacts of salinity, ion type, and aging process were investigated on coalescence and spreading of crude oil interfaces (including an oil droplet and an oil film) under gravity, through drop rest time measurement techniques, aided by an image analysis system. Three different salt solutions of NaCl, Na2SO4, and MgCl2 were studied at different ionic strengths, ranged from 1% to 150% of Persian Gulf seawater ionic strength. According to the results, aging the oil droplet in the brine increased the interfacial rigidity. Addition of a gas phase - by thinning the surface oil film - almost doubled both rest time and spreading time values. In the aged mode, the presence of salt in... 

During recent years, extensive studies have been conducted around the world documenting liquefaction induced lateral spreading and its effects on deep foundations. This study is aimed to numerically model a shaking table experiment, to investigate the effect of lateral spreading on piles and also to assess the capability of an advanced critical state two-surface plasticity model in predicting soil and pile responses to lateral spreading. Changes in permeability of the soil layers during the shaking are also accounted for using the software's built-in programming language, FISH. Numerical results showed that the onset of liquefaction occurs after just a few cycles from the beginning of the... 

Active learning method (ALM) is a powerful fuzzy-based soft computing methodology suitable for various applications such as function modeling, control systems, clustering and classification. Despite considerable advantages, the main computational engine of ALM, ink drop spread (IDS), is memory-intensive, which imposes significant area overheads in the hardware realization of the ALM for real-time applications. In this paper, we propose a compressed model for ALM which greatly alleviates the storage limitations. The proposed approach employs a distinct inference algorithm, enabling a significant reduction in memory utilization from O(N2) to O(2N) for a multi-input single-output (MISO) system.... 

Computed Tomography (CT) is one of the most widely used screening and diagnostic tools in medical imaging centers. Considering IAEA HUMAN HEALTH SERIES No. 19 and the American College of Radiology (ACR) Accreditation Program, quality assurance (QA) and quality control (QC) are mandatory programs to periodically monitor the system condition to promote the effective utilization of ionization radiation for a diagnostic outcome through obtaining and retaining appropriate image quality and reduction of patient dose. Computational phantoms (CPs) are the key tool to monitor system condition. The commercial QC phantoms are expensive products and are not flexible enough for user demands. In this... 

In this paper, we propose a light-weight jamming-resistant scheme for the Internet-of-Things (IoT) in 5G networks to ensure high-quality communication in a two-hop cooperative network. In the considered system model, a source communicates with a destination in the presence of an untrusted relay and a powerful multi-Antenna adversary jammer. The untrusted relay is an authorized necessary helper who may wiretap the confidential information. Meanwhile, the jammer is an external attacker who tries to damage both the training and transmission phases. Different from traditional frequency hopping spread spectrum (FHSS) techniques that require a pre-determined pattern between communicating nodes, in... 

The Internet-of-Things (IoT) spans various applications in healthcare filed, from smart wearable or implantable sensors to remote monitoring of elderly, and medical device networking. In this paper, a jamming-resistant scheme for the healthcare IoT is proposed to provide secure and reliable data transmission in a two-hop cooperative network, where a source communicates with a destination in the presence of an untrusted relay and an active adversary. The untrusted relay is an authorized necessary helper who may wiretap the confidential information, e.g., the secret measured data of a patient, while the jammer is an external attacker who tries to interrupt the communication. Different from... 

In ecological systems, heterogeneous interactions between pathogens take place simultaneously. This occurs, for instance, when two pathogens cooperate, while at the same time, multiple strains of these pathogens co-circulate and compete. Notable examples include the cooperation of human immunodeficiency virus with antibiotic-resistant and susceptible strains of tuberculosis or some respiratory infections with Streptococcus pneumoniae strains. Models focusing on competition or cooperation separately fail to describe how these concurrent interactions shape the epidemiology of such diseases. We studied this problem considering two cooperating pathogens, where one pathogen is further structured... 

For a graph G of order n, let λ 2 (G) denote its second smallest Laplacian eigenvalue. It was conjectured that λ 2 (G)+λ 2 (G‾)≥1, where G‾ is the complement of G. For any x∈R n , let ∇ x ∈R (n2) be the vector whose {i,j}-th entry is |x i −x j |. In this paper, we show the aforementioned conjecture is equivalent to prove that every two orthonormal vectors f,g∈R n with zero mean satisfy ‖∇ f −∇ g ‖ 2 ≥2. In this article, it is shown that for the validity of the conjecture it suffices to prove that the conjecture holds for all permutation graphs. © 2019 Elsevier Inc  

The modulation transfer function (MTF) is well known as a crucial parameter in quality assurance of computed tomography (CT) scanners, which provides detailed information of both contrast and resolution of CT images. Different methods have been introduced and developed to calculate the MTF of CT scanners. However, a robust methodology which accurately estimates the MTF of CT scanners under the use of every range of object electron density and tube current-time product (mAs) has not been reported so far. To this aim, a new wavelet-based circular edge method for MTF measurement has been presented in this work. Owning to the edge spread function (ESF) susceptibility to noise, the approach was...