Sharif Digital Repository

Research on the reliable characterization of saturated permeability has received great yet necessary attention globally. However, most studies were carried out on soils with a volumetric tendency being almost insensitive to water saturation or at least with this hidden assumption. This is clearly not the case when dealing with the two broad categories of problematic soils, including collapsible and expansive soils. As confirmed by previous research, at least one-fifth of the planet comprises of these soils with a relatively fair distribution. Therefore, the main objective of this study is to introduce a low-compliance double cell/burette permeameter to track all volumetric changes during the... 

Ageing is one of the main contributing factors towards increasing arterial stiffness, leading to changes in peripheral pulses propagation. Therefore the characteristics of the photoplethysmogram (PPG) pulse, especially the rising edge and peak position, are greatly affected. In this study, the PPG pulse rising edge and corresponding peak position have been investigated non-invasively in human subjects as a function of age. Fifteen healthy subjects were selected and grouped in five age intervals, from 20 to 59 years, based on their comparable systolic-diastolic blood pressure and PPG amplitude. As expected, the peripheral pulse shows a steep rise and early peak in younger subjects. With age,... 

In this paper a complete design of a high speed optical motion analyzer system has been described. The main core of the image processing unit has been implemented by the differential algorithm procedure. Some intelligent and conservative procedures that facilitate the search algorithm have also been proposed and implemented for the processing of human motions. Moreover, an optimized modified direct linear transformation (MDLT) method has been used to reconstruct 3D markers positions which are used for deriving kinematic characteristics of the motion. Consequently, a set of complete tests using some simple mechanical devices were conducted to verify the system outputs. Considering the system... 

A headspace solvent microextraction method was developed for the trace determination of geosmin, an odorant compound, in water samples. After performing the extraction by a microdrop of an organic solvent, the microdrop was introduced directly into a GC-MS injection port. One-at-the-time optimization strategy was applied to investigate and optimize some important extraction parameters such as type of solvent, drop volume, temperature, stirring rate, ionic strength, sample volume, and extraction time. The analytical data exhibited an RSD of less than 5% (n = 5), a linear calibration range of 5-900 ng/L (r2 > 0.998), and a detection limit of 0.8 and 3.3 ng/L using two different sets of... 

The rheological properties of fuel suspensions with various solid loadings up to close their maximum packing fraction and suspending media having different viscosities are investigated using the rotational viscometer at relatively low shear rates in which suspensions behave as Newtonian fluids. Aluminum (Al) and ammonium perchlorate (AP) particles are major solid components of any solid fuel system which should be distributed uniformly inside a polymeric binder based on hydroxyl terminated polybutadiene (HTPB). The experimental data generated in this investigation indicates that the relative viscosity of the suspensions is independent of viscosity of polymer binder, but in addition to solid... 

In recent years, extensive research in the field of Deep Learning (DL) has led to the development of a wide array of machine learning algorithms dedicated to solving complex tasks such as image classification or speech recognition. Due to their unprecedented ability to explore large volumes of data and extract meaningful hidden structures, DL models have naturally drawn attention from various fields in science. Analytical chemistry, in particular, has successfully benefited from the application of DL tools for extracting qualitative and quantitative information from high-dimensional and complex chemical measurements. This report provides introductory reading for understanding DL machinery... 

Undoubtedly, microfluidics has been a focal point of interdisciplinary science during the last two decades, resulting in many developments in this area. Centrifugal microfluidic platforms have good potential for use in point-of-care devices because they take advantage of some intrinsic forces, most notably centrifugal force, which obviates the need to any external driving forces. Herein, we introduce a newly designed detection chamber for use on microfluidic discs that can be employed as an absorbance readout step in cases where the final solution has a very low viscosity and surface tension. In such situations, our chamber easily eliminates the air bubbles from the final solution without... 

Exploring efficient chemotherapy would benefit from a deeper understanding of the tumor microenvironment (TME) and its role in tumor progression. As in vivo experimental methods are unable to isolate or control individual factors of the TME, and in vitro models often cannot include all the contributing factors, some questions are best addressed with mathematical models of systems biology. In this study, we establish a multi-scale mathematical model of the TME to simulate three-dimensional tumor growth and angiogenesis and then implement the model for an array of chemotherapy approaches to elucidate the effect of TME conditions and drug scheduling on controlling tumor progression. The... 

In addition to its biological importance, DPhPC lipid bilayers are widely used in droplet bilayers, study of integral membrane proteins, drug delivery systems as well as patch-clamp electrophysiology of ion channels, yet their mechanical properties are not fully measured. Herein, we examined the effect of the ether linkage on the mechanical properties of ester- and ether-DPhPC lipid bilayers using all-atom molecular dynamics simulation. The values of area per lipid, thickness, intrinsic lateral pressure profile, order parameter, and elasticity moduli were estimated using various computational frameworks and were compared with available experimental values. Overall, a good agreement was... 

Globally, the impacts of climate change can vary across different regions. This study uses a probability framework to evaluate recent historical (1976–2016) and near-future projected (until 2049) climate change across Europe using Climate Research Unit and ensemble climate model datasets (under RCPs 2.6 and 8.5). A historical assessment shows that although the east and west of the domain experienced the largest and smallest increase in temperature, changes in precipitation are not as smooth as temperature. Results indicate that the maximum changes between distributions of the variables (temperature and precipitation) mainly occur at extreme percentiles (e.g., 10% and 90%). A group analysis... 

The interaction between a lake and groundwater has important implications to the quantity and quality of water in both environments. Quantification of lake-groundwater interaction (LGI) has been challenging in regions with limited in-situ data. LGI can be quantified by physically-based models, direct measurement of seepage, measurements of conservative chemical or isotopic tracers, and lake water balance. Despite the accuracy of the methods based on hydrochemical or isotopic measurements and analysis, they require extensive field data that are costly to collect in large lakes. Instead, the data required to quantify LGI by the lake water budget method can be obtained via typical ground... 

This study investigated the lake–aquifer hydraulic interactions in Lake Urmia (LU) as the second largest hypersaline lake in the world. Due to the scarcity of hydrogeological data required for modelling, a method based on Darcy’s Law and lake water budget was used to quantify the lake–aquifer interaction. Long-term ground- and satellite-based hydrological datasets over the time frame 2001–2019 were used. Results indicate that the groundwater flux between LU and the aquifers controls 18.74 ± 1.67% of the lake’s water storage. While 10 out of 14 adjacent aquifers recharge LU at a rate of less than 180 m3/m.month, one phreatic aquifer recharges the LU up to 1400 m3/m.month. Two aquifers are... 

In recent years, convolutional neural networks and deep neural networks have been used extensively in various fields of analytical chemistry. The use of these models for calibration tasks has been highly effective; however, few reports have been published on their properties and characteristics of analytical figures of merit. Currently, most performance measures for these types of networks only incorporate some function of prediction error. While useful, these measures are incomplete and cannot be used as an objective comparison among different models. In this report, a new method for calculating the sensitivity of any type of neural network is proposed and studied on both simulated and real... 

Escherichia coli is widely used host for the intracellular expression of many proteins. However, in some cases also secretion of protein from periplasm was observed. Improvement of both intracellular and extracellular production of recombinant protein in E. coli is an attractive goal in order to reduce production cost and increase process efficiency and economics. Since heat shock proteins in E. coli were reported to be helpful for protein refolding and hindering aggregation, in this work different types of single and periodic heat shocks were tested on lab scale to enhance intracellular and extracellular protein production. A single heat shock prior to induction and different oscillatory... 

Assessment of groundwater quality monitoring networks requires methods to determine the potential efficiency and cost-effectiveness of the current monitoring programs. To this end, the concept of entropy has been considered as a promising method in previous studies since it quantitatively measures the information produced by a network. In this study, the measure of transinformation in the discrete entropy theory and the transinformation- distance (T-D) curves, which are used frequently by other researchers, are used to quantify the efficiency of a monitoring network. This paper introduces a new approach to decrease dispersion in results by performing cluster analysis that uses fuzzy... 

Different grades of carbon nanotubes (CNTs) were dispersed in poly(tetramethylene ether glycol) (PTMEG) without any solvent in the presence of a block copolymer dispersing agent by ultrasonication at a temperature well above the melting point of the PTMEG. The state of CNT dispersion at different length scales was evaluated by using optical microscopy, UV-Vis spectroscopy, rheological measurements, differential scanning calorimetry, thermogravimetric analysis and sedimentation tests. Optical microscopy can be used to characterize the state of dispersion and CNT network formation on a micrometer scale, whereas UV-Vis provides useful information about the dispersion of individual CNTs at... 

As balance is the foundation for all voluntary motor skills, considerable research has been conducted to evaluate postural control in patients with low back pain (LBP). Although reliability is a population-specific property, to the authors' knowledge, there has been no study to determine the test-retest reliability of the center of pressure (COP) measures in the general population of LBP patients. As many as 11 patients with a history of nonspecific LBP randomly completed postural measurements with three levels of difficulty (rigid surface-eyes open, rigid surface-eyes closed, and foam surface-eyes closed) in two sessions. The COP data were used to calculate standard deviation of amplitude,... 

Volatile components of saffron from different regions of Iran were extracted by ultrasonic-assisted solvent extraction (USE) and were analyzed by gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS). Self-modeling curve resolution (SMCR) was proposed for resolving the co-eluted GC-MS peak clusters into pure chromatograms and mass spectra. Multivariate curve resolution-objective function minimization (MCR-FMIN) and multivariate curve resolution-alternating least square (MCR-ALS) were successfully used for this purpose. The accuracy of the qualitative and quantitative results was improved considerably using SMCR techniques. Comparison of the results of saffron from different regions of Iran showed... 

Comprehensive two-dimensional gas chromatography and flame ionization detection combined with unfolded-partial least squares is proposed as a simple, fast and reliable method to assess the quality of gasoline and to detect its potential adulterants. The data for the calibration set are first baseline corrected using a two-dimensional asymmetric least squares algorithm. The number of significant partial least squares components to build the model is determined using the minimum value of root-mean square error of leave-one out cross validation, which was 4. In this regard, blends of gasoline with kerosene, white spirit and paint thinner as frequently used adulterants are used to make... 

This paper presents a novel approach for evaluating LBP in various settings. The proposed system uses cost-effective inertial sensors, in conjunction with pattern recognition techniques, for identifying sensitive classifiers towards discriminate identification of LB patients. 24 healthy individuals and 28 low back pain patients performed trunk motion tasks in five different directions for validation. Four combinations of these motions were selected based on literature, and the corresponding kinematic data was collected. Upon filtering (4th order, low pass Butterworth filter) and normalizing the data, Principal Component Analysis was used for feature extraction, while Support Vector Machine...