Sharif Digital Repository

Effective and rapid mixing is crucial for chemical and biological processes. The purpose of the current study is to investigate the effect of steady and varying magnetic field on the mixing of a water-based ferrofluid and two streams of deionized water inside a microchannel for Lab-on-Chip applications. To this end, the nonlinear governing equations, the momentum equation, the continuity equation, the mass transport equation and the Maxwell-Ampere equations are numerically solved. A commercial code based on the finite-element method is used and the numerical simulations are validated by the experimental results in the literature. To augment the mixing performance, the effects of influencing... 

This paper proposes an asymmetric model for urban public transportation networks. Predictive techniques are being developed, to allow advanced modeling and comparison with historical baseline data. The current trend is toward fewer costly microprocessor modules with hardware memory management and Real-Time Operating Systems This model is formulated as a linear programming problem using LP-solvers and is developed and simulated for a large metropolitan area of Tehran, Iran. The mathematical procedure as its quantitative results is presented. © 2008 IEEE  

The dispersion of a neutral solute band by electrokinetic flow in polyelectrolyte layer (PEL)-grafted rectangular/slit microchannels is theoretically studied. The flow is assumed to be both steady and fully developed and a first-order irreversible reaction is considered at the wall to account for probable surface adsorption of solutes. Considering low electric potentials, analytical solutions are obtained for electric potential, fluid velocity and solute concentration. Special solutions are also obtained for the case without wall adsorption. To track the dispersion properties of the solute band, the generalized dispersion model is adopted by considering the exchange, the convection and the... 

Stop-skipping and timetable synchronization are two effective strategies to reduce total passengers’ travel time in a transit network for subway operation. However, the majority of studies conducted on the topic do not consider stop-skipping strategy and timetable synchronization simultaneously. Thus, this article proposes a mixed-integer programming model considering both strategies simultaneously. The model is based on passenger smart-card data concerning the trains’ capacity to minimize total passengers’ waiting time and in-vehicle time and maximize the number of passengers who successfully reach their destination in a specific study horizon. Since increasing the number of trains,... 

We outline a comprehensive numerical procedure for modeling of species transport and surface reaction kinetics in electrokinetically actuated microfluidic devices of rectangular cross section. Our results confirm the findings of previous simplified approaches that a concentration wave is created for sufficiently long microreactors. An analytical solution, developed for the wave propagation speed, shows that, when normalizing with the fluid mean velocity, it becomes a function of three parameters comprising the channel aspect ratio, the relative adsorption capacity, and the kinetic equilibrium constant. Our studies also reveal that the reactor geometry idealized as a slit, instead of a... 

Bus terminal assignment with the objective of maximizing public transportation service is known as bus terminal location problem (BTLP). We formulate the BTLP, a problem of concern in transportation industry, as a p-uncapacitated facility location problem (p-UFLP) with distance constraint. The p-UFLP being NP-hard (Krarup and Pruzan, 1990), we propose evolutionary algorithms for its solution. According to the No Free Lunch theorem and the good efficiency of the distinctive preserve recombination (DPX) operator, we design a new recombination operator for solving a BTLP by new evolutionary and memetic algorithms namely, genetic local search algorithms (GLS). We also define the potential... 

Gas diffusion layers are essential components of proton exchange membrane fuel cell since the reactants should pass through these layers. Mass transport in these layers is highly dependent on porosity. Many of simulations have assumed, for simplicity, the porosity of GDL is constant, but in practice, there is a considerable variation in porosity along gas diffusion layers. In the present study the porosity variation in GDL is calculated by considering the applied pressure and the amount of water generated in the cell. A two dimensional mathematical model is developed to investigate the effect of stack compression and water generation on porosity of GDL and cell performance. The validity of... 

Fluid particle diffusion through blood flow within a capillary tube is an important phenomenon to understand, especially for studies in mass transport in the microcirculation as well as in solving technical issues involved in mixing in biomedical microdevices. In this paper, the spreading of tracer particles through up to 20% hematocrit blood, flowing in a capillary tube, was studied using a confocal micro-PTV system. We tracked hundreds of particles in high-hematocrit blood and measured the radial dispersion coefficient. Results yielded significant enhancement of the particle diffusion, due to a micron-scale flow-field generated by red blood cell motions. By increasing the flow rate, the...