Sharif Digital Repository

In the preparation of nanocomposites, the multi-walled carbon nanotubes (MWCNTs) functionalized by hydroxyl groups were used. Subsequently, the polyethylene/multi-walled carbon nanotube (PE/MWCNTs) nanocomposites were prepared via in situ polymerization technique. In this study, effect of MWCNTs on the thermal degradation of these PE/MWCNT nanocomposites was investigated; the thermal degradations of pure PE and PE nanocomposites with different concentrations of nanotubes (0.5, 1.5, 3.5 wt %) have been studied by using thermal gravimetric analysis (TGA). Samples were heated to 700˚C at different heating rates (5, 10, 15, and 20˚C/min). TGA was used to investigate the effect of the MWCNTs on... 

Emission of aromatic and aliphatic compounds to atmosphere is a major environmental concern for many urban societies. Catalytic oxidation of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) is an efficient and low operating cost technology for reduction of air pollution.
First, dispersed copper oxide nano-catalysts supported on almond shell-based activated carbon were prepared for catalytic oxidation of toluene in air. The Response Surface Methodology (RSM) was used to express the catalyst removal efficiency in terms of catalyst metal loading and calcination temperature. Calcination temperature had a significant effect on the catalyst activity only at high metal loadings (upper 8% wt.). Two different... 

Volatile organic materials are amongst the most important air pollutants that presence of the moisture in polluted air during oxidation process are the most difficult to remove volatile contaminants using catalysts. In this study, nano-copper oxide catalyst on nano-alumina for complete oxidation of toluene in the presence of moisture at different temperatures and atmospheric pressure were examined. Alumina basic using co-precipitation and sol-gel methods have been synthesized, which is for the first time that alumina tri-second-butyl pre-manufacturer have been used for gamma-nano-alumina by sole gel method was used. Surface properties of synthesized nano-alumina have been studies by various... 

Demand for the petroleum products is continuously increasing. Crude oil cannot be used as it is extracted, so that, there should be some treatment that may ended up producing heavy hydrocarbons. Therefore, refineries are searching for developing new technologies for upgrading those heavy materials and convert more and more bottom-of-the-barrel into high value distillate. Amongst the different residua upgrading processes, thermal upgrading processes are of the most interest and account for over 60% of total residua processing capacity. In this work, we investigate the effect of different additives in a delayed coking process. We used vacuum distillation residue of Abadan heavy crude oil... 

Ethylene is considered as one of the key materials in the petrochemical industry and has a particular importance. Polymerized ethylene produces polyethylene, which is widely used in plastics and pipe-manufacturing industries. Ethylene is mainly produced by the processes of catalytic cracking or thermal cracking of heavier hydrocarbon compounds. In these processes, acetylene is produced as a by-product, which deactivates the Ziegler-Nata catalysts in the polymerization unit of ethylene. Therefore, there should be some considerations to reduce acetylene to its minimum value -around zero. For this purpose, the fixed bed catalytic reactor is used to hydrogenate acetylene to ethylene. Various... 

Most refineries are looking for a process in order to remove heavy compounds and convert them into lighter, more valuable materials. Among the various remaining upgrade processes, non-catalytic heating processes are very attractive and have gotten a wider scope worldwide because the feed used for the upgrade process is high in metal and sulfur, which causes the catalyst surface to become toxic and inactive. Due to that, the thermal cracking process is more suitable for such feeds than the catalytic cracking process. Due to the reduction of sweet crude oil resources and the heavier refinery feeds and increase in amount of global fuel needs, refineries must process a larger share of feed in... 

Iran is one of the richest historic countries in the world, as extention of cultural heritage and historic building is unique. Infestation of lichens to those heritages for doing strategic actions wants the coordination of systems and organizations and universities. All the actions that do in this field, about the conservation and preservation of heritage made by stone related to architecture, be limited to lasers, electromagnetic waves, and application of jet methods such as sand storm, water jet, and prior to this mechanical and handful methods that approximately all be destructive. Application of nanoparticles of titania, as a smart photocatalytic material with antimicrobial and... 

The aim of this project is to fabricate and study heterogeneous CaO-based nanocatalysts with lithium and zinc enhancers for the esterification reaction of rapeseed oil and methanol to produce biodiesel as a renewable and alternative fuel for fossil fuels. Is. First, Zn-Li / CaO catalysts with weight ratio Li: Zn: CaO, 2: 2: 7 and by combining different percentages of Li100% promoter, Li75% -Zn25%, Li50% -Zn50%, Li25% -Zn75%, 100% Zn were made on the basis of CaO by wet inoculation. Characterization tests to evaluate the structure and characterization such as X-ray diffraction (XRD) spectroscopy, scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and X-ray diffraction (EDX) spectroscopy, Bruner-Emmett-Teller... 

A triple photocatalytic composite of biochar, metal-organic framework and phosphomolybdic acid was prepared through solvothermal treatment of iron (III) chloride hexahydrate, terephthalic acid, lavandulifolia-derived biochar and phosphomolybdic acid. The composite was thoroughly characterized and utilized for photodegradation of organic dyes under visible light irradiation. Investigations of reaction variables confirmed that, the highest yield of 96.2% for a cationic Rhodamine-B (RhB) dye was achieved at ambient temperature when using 0.07 g of catalyst at pH of 7 and a dye concentration of 10 ppm. The activity of the composite was superior compared to its individual components implying... 

A series of V2O5 catalysts supported on multiwall carbon nanotube (MWCNT), single wall carbon nanotube (SWCNT) and graphene were synthesized by hydrothermal and reflux methods for oxidative dehydrogenation of propane (ODHP) to propylene. The catalysts were characterized by techniques including the BET surface area measurements, XRD, FTIR, H2-TPR, NH3-TPD, FESEM and UV-vis diffuse reflectance. The performance of the catalysts and the supports were subsequently examined in a fixed bed reactor. The vanadium catalyst supported on graphene with C/V molar ratio of 1:1 synthesized through the hydrothermal method had the best performance under the reactor test conditions of 450°C, feed C3H8/Air... 

In this investigation, silica-based iron-metal catalyst was synthesized by the Atomic layer deposited (ALD) method with iron-acetylate (Fe(acac)3) as a precursor in different loading dosages. The synthesized catalyst were characterized by nitrogen absorption and excretion (BET), by Field Emission Scanning Electron Microscope (FESEM), X-ray diffraction (XRD), and Temperature-Programmed Reduction (TPR), Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), Atomic Emission Spectroscopy (ICP) etc.
The temperature range of 180 to 200 °C was determined for the self-limited chemisorption of Fe(acac)3 on the silica surface as the first and the most important step in a single atomic cycle. Also the... 

Isolation and characterization of circulating tumor cells (CTCs) found in blood samples of cancer patients have been considered as a reliable source for cancer prognosis and diagnosis. A new continuous microfluidic platform has been designed in this investigation for simultaneous capture and characterization of CTCs based on their deformability. The deformability-based chip (D-Chip) consists of two sections of separation and characterization where slanted weirs with a gap of 7 μm were considered. Although sometimes CTCs and leukocytes have the same size, the deformability differs in such a way that can be exploited for enrichment purposes. MCF7 and MDA-MB-231 cell lines were used for the... 

In recent decades, desulfurization processes have become essential to decrease environmental pollution due to the emission of sulfur from fuels. In this study, in order to desulfurize liquid fuel, a model fuel (normal heptane) was investigated under visible light ) 350-watt sodium lamp(, using H2O2 as oxidant and methanol as a solvent in the presence of Cu-C-TiO2 nanostructure. C-TiO2 was synthesized by the hydrothermal method. In order to modify and improve the properties, we doped the copper metal by impregnation method with different loading of Cu. Experimental results exhibited the highest activity among samples attributed to 0.5% Cu-C-TiO2 Which caused 98.27% degradation of DBT after 2... 

There is a need from the natural gas and energy industries to seek for an economically attractive way of converting remote gas reserves into transportable products, such as high quality fuels or petrochemicals. A possible way for the conversion of natural gas to middle distillates is based on a three-step process. Firstly, production of syngas from natural gas. Secondly,catalytic conversion of syngas into hydrocarbons, mostly parafins from C5 to C100. (Fischer-Tropsch (F-T) synthesis). Thirdly, hydrocracking of the heavy paraffinic hydrocarbons to middle distillates. The F-T synthesis step is highly exothermic. In order to control the temperature within the reactor, when considering high... 

Carbon dioxide photocatalytic reduction is one of the promising methods used to produce a wide range of renewable hydrocarbon fuels using sunlight in the presence of photocatalysts. In this study, a series of Nickel and Bismuth doped titanium dioxide samples were synthesized by Sol-gel method. After performing photocatalytic carbon dioxide recovery experiments and finding the optimum percentage of Nickel and Bismuth doped titanium dioxide,Ni and Bi co-doped TiO2 sample showed the highest photocatalytic activity. Amount of methane production was 21.13 μmol/gcat in the presence of co-doped sample that was about 6.5 times higher than the amount of methane produced in the presence of pure TiO2... 

The adsorption equilibria of carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrogen on pelletized cation-exchanged faujasite zeolite (with alkali, alkaline earth, and transition metal ions) have been investigated by a volumetric apparatus. The standard instrumental analytical techniques, including X-ray diffraction (XRD), field emission scanning electron microscopy (FESEM) coupled with energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDX), and atomic absorption spectroscopy (AAS) were utilized to characterize binder-free modified zeolites. The EDX spectra and AAS results revealed that the ion-exchange was successfully achieved with expected tendencies. The results indicate that the type of cation present in the zeolite... 

Fischer-Tropsch synthesis (FTS) is the main part of a Gas to Liquid (GTL) process. In this reaction which shall be done based upon iron or cobalt catalysts, H2 and CO molecules (namely Syngas) transform to long hydrocarbon chains. Regarding all of the advantages of cobalt catalysts in comparison with iron counterparts, Research Institute of Petroleum Industry (RIPI) began investigations since two decade ago. The present catalyst comprised of cobalt as active metal, ruthenium as activity promiter and lanthanum as support (gamma alumina) modifier. By the way, still some areas such as its lifetime duration and deactivation needs to be improved by complimentary researches. The present... 

In this study, desulfurization of petroleum coke has been investigated for use in aluminum industry. To reduce sulfur content in petroleum coke, desulfurization has been investigated by two methods of solvent extraction and molten caustic leaching. The method of molten caustic leaching at temperatures of 400-600 °C has been investigated. Other effective parameters on the desulfurization of petroleum coke are the mass ratio of alkali to feed (petroleum coke) in the range of 0.5-1.5 and the time of 1-3 hour and the mesh size of 200-600 micron. In this study, the conditions of desulfurization of petroleum coke using potassium hydroxide have been investigated. Results show that by using the... 

The photoreduction of CO2 to produce renewable solar fuel known as artificial photosynthesis attracted a lot of attention during the last two decades due to the global warming issue caused through increasing CO2 and shortage of fossil fuels resources. In this study, in order to enhance photocatalytic process of CO2 under visible light, TiO2-graphene and TiO2-copper nanocomposite utilized. A series of Cu/TiO2 photocatalysts were prepared with various Cu (2, 5 and 8 wt%) and a series of G/TiO2 photocatalysts with different graphene (G) content (5, 20 and 40 wt.%) were prepared and tested for the reduction of CO2. XRD, BET, DRS and TEM analyses employed to characterize the catalyst while the... 

Nowadays, the use of microreactors is receiving a great deal of attention due to the unique characteristics of such systems, such as high surface-to-volume ratio, low material loss, greater safety, and minimizing mass and heat transfer limitations. In this study, the optimization of the continuous-flow synthesis of Plavix by Cu-MOF heterogeneous catalyst utilizing a glass microreactor was investigated. Structural characteristics of the catalyst were investigated using X-ray diffraction spectroscopy (XRD), Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), Scanning electron microscopy (SEM), and BET surface area studies to describe the structure and morphology of the catalyst. In order to build...