Sharif Digital Repository

Attempts were made to trace the effect of organoclay (OC) on the rheological and mechanical behaviors of the low density polyethylene (LDPE)/ethylene-vinyl acetate (EVA) blends. To do this effectively, in addition to LDPE/EVA/OC system, pure LDPE and LDPE/EVA blends were also examined as model systems. The rheological behavior was determined by the capillary rheometer. Morphological characterization was also carried out using X-ray diffraction (XRD), scanning electron microscopy (SEM), transmission electron microscopy (TEM) and theoretical approach based on interfacial energies. Shear viscosity, tensile strength and elastic modulus of LDPE/EVA were found to decrease by increasing the EVA... 

Understanding the co-crystallization behavior of ternary polyethylene (PE) blends is a challenging task. Herein, in addition to co-crystallization behavior, the rheological and mechanical properties of melt compounded high density polyethylene (HDPE)/low density polyethylene (LDPE)/Zeigler − Natta linear low density polyethylene (ZN-LLDPE) blends have been studied in detail. The HDPE content of the blends was kept constant at 40 wt% and the LDPE/ZN-LLDPE ratio was varied from 0.5 to 2. Rheological measurements confirmed the melt miscibility of the entire blends. Study of the crystalline structure of the blends using DSC, wide angle X-ray scattering, small angle X-ray scattering and field... 

McEliece and Goldreich–Goldwasser–Halevi (GGH) cryptosystems are two instances of code and lattice-based cryptosystems whose security are based on the hardness of coding theoretic and lattice problems, respectively. However, such cryptosystems have a number of drawbacks which make them inefficient in practice. On the other hand, low density lattice codes (LDLCs) are practical lattice codes which can achieve capacity over additive white Gaussian noise channel and also can be encoded and decoded efficiently. This paper introduces a public key cryptosystem based on Latin square LDLCs, by which a relationship can be attained between code and lattice-based cryptography. In this way, we can... 

An attempt to synthesize pyrochlore free (x)PMN-(1 - x)PZT ceramics (where x is 0, 0.1, 0.3, 0.5, 0.7, 0.9, and 1) by a mixed powder method was made. In this work, a sol-gel prepared PZT powder was mixed with the mixture of milled PbO, MgO and Nb2O5, and sintered in a two step sintering process. The produced samples with high PZT content showed low densities due to the low compaction ratio of PZT powder. The dielectric properties of PZT-rich and PMN-rich materials were high (with dielectric constant of about 19,000 and 33,000 for PZT-rich and PMN-rich ceramics, respectively) while the other samples exhibited low dielectric properties. Also, the effect of combining PMN with PZT on Curie... 

E-waste has become one of the greatest sources of environmental pollution. Bioleaching is known as a new, simple, and environmentally friendly technology for metal recovery requiring low energy input, unskilled labor operations, moderate conditions, and low costs. Acidithiobacillus ferrooxidans is a famous and puissant mesophilic bacterium applied extensively to recover metals from ores and different industrial and municipal wastes. It is necessary to identify the parameters affecting consumers E-waste recycling. Separating and recovering different types of E-waste is impossible for small recycling units. There should be a specific combination of E-waste, enabling the extraction of the... 

Polystyrene, acrylonitrile butadiene styrene, and polypropylene are the main polymers in E-waste, existing about 31%, 16%, and 13%, respectively. In this research, the effects of the elimination of low-density materials (such as polymers and plastics) were studied using the shaking table method. Bioleaching of Cu and Ni against the original sample (Sample #1) and pre-treated sample without low-density materials (Sample #2) was compared. The amount of bioleached metals and growth characteristics (including pH, Eh, bacterial count) was investigated within 25 days. The analysis of Sample #1 showed that at pulp density of 15 g/l, 94% and 79% of Cu and Ni were recovered maximally, respectively,... 

We propose a new nonlinear Rao-Nam like symmetric key encryption scheme. In our design, we employ a specific type of coded modulation schemes namely quasi-cyclic low-density parity-check (QC-LDPC) lattice-codes which have low-complexity encoding and decoding algorithms. Due to the application of coded modulation schemes in our design, the proposed scheme performs encryption, encoding and modulation simultaneously. Therefore, we regard the proposed scheme as a joint cryptosystem. The proposed joint cryptosystem withstands all variants of chosen plaintext attacks applied on Rao-Nam like cryptosystems due to its nonlinearity. Moreover, some conditions implying the uniformity of the ciphertexts... 

Low density turbidity currents have been investigated in a laboratory flume. An Acoustic Doppler Velocimeter (ADV) was used to measure the velocity. The dimensionless velocity profiles were compared with previous studies to check the accuracy of acoustic measuring techniques for turbidity currents. Successful use of the ADV to measure the current velocity has led to interest in the technique of using acoustic sensors to estimate concentrations. Acoustic backscattering analyses are used for estimating the sediment concentration in turbidity currents. With this approach, concentration measurements can be reasonably well represented by a similarity profile. Using this technique, an accurate... 

Sulfur mustard (SM) is a vesication chemical warfare agent for which there is currently no antidote. Despite years of research, there is no common consensus about the pathophysiological basis of chronic pulmonary disease caused by this chemical warfare agent. In this study, we combined chemometric techniques with nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy to explore the metabolic profile of sera from SM-exposed patients. A total of 29 serum samples obtained from 17 SM-injured patients, and 12 healthy controls were analyzed by Random Forest. Increased concentrations of seven amino acids, glycerol, dimethylamine, ketone bodies, lactate, acetate, citrulline and creatine together with the... 

Objective(s): This study aims to evaluate combined proton nuclear magnetic resonance (1H NMR) spectroscopy and gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS) metabolic profiling approaches, for discriminating between mustard airway diseases (MADs) and healthy controls and for providing biochemical information on this disease. Materials and Methods: In the present study, analysis of serum samples collected from 17 MAD subjects and 12 healthy controls was performed using NMR. Of these subjects, 14 (8 patients and 6 controls) were analyzed by GC-MS. Then, their spectral profiles were subjected to principal component analysis (PCA) and orthogonal partial least squares regression discriminant...