Sharif Digital Repository

Digital documents are usually degraded during the scanning process due to the contents of the backside of the scanned manuscript. This is often caused by the show-through effect, i. e. the backside image that interferes with the main front side picture due to the intrinsic transparency of the paper. This phenomenon is one of the degradations that one would like to remove especially in the field of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) or document digitalization which require denoised texts as inputs. In this paper, we first propose a novel and general nonlinear model for canceling the show-through phenomenon. A nonlinear blind source separation algorithm is used for this purpose based on a new... 

This paper deals with blind separation of finite alphabet sources where we have n sources and only one observation. The method is applied directly in time (spatial) domain and no transformation is needed. It follows a two stage procedure. In the first stage the mixing coefficients are estimated, and in the second stage the sources are separated using the estimated mixing coefficients. We also study restrictions of this method and conditions for which its performance is acceptable. Simulation results are presented to show the ability of this method to source separation in images and pulse amplitude modulation (PAM) signals  

Since plasma is rich in many biomarkers used in clinical diagnostic experiments, microscale blood plasma separation is a primitive step in most of microfluidic analytical chips. In this paper, a passive microfluidic device for on-chip blood plasma separation based on Zweifach–Fung effect and plasma skimming was designed and fabricated by hot embossing of microchannels on a PMMA substrate and thermal bonding process. Human blood was diluted in various times and injected into the device. The main novelty of the proposed microfluidic device is the design of diffuser-shaped daughter channels. Our results demonstrated that this design exerted a considerable positive influence on the separation... 

A geometric method for separating PNL mixtures, for the case of 2 sources and 2 sensors, has been presented. The main idea is to find compensating nonlinearities to transform the scatter plot of observations to a parallelogram. It then results in a linear mixture which can be separated by any linear source separation algorithm. An indirect result of the paper is another separability proof of PNL mixtures of bounded sources for 2 sources and 2 sensors  

Since plasma is rich in many biomarkers used in clinical diagnostic experiments, microscale blood plasma separation is a primitive step in most of microfluidic analytical chips. In this paper, a passive microfluidic device for on-chip blood plasma separation based on Zweifach–Fung effect and plasma skimming was designed and fabricated by hot embossing of microchannels on a PMMA substrate and thermal bonding process. Human blood was diluted in various times and injected into the device. The main novelty of the proposed microfluidic device is the design of diffuser-shaped daughter channels. Our results demonstrated that this design exerted a considerable positive influence on the separation... 

UF6 gas flow in the total regions of a rotor with the radius of 0.1 m and the length of 1 m in axisymmetric and steady states was simulated using a new hybrid CFD-DSMC method in the OpenFOAM framework. Implicit coupled density-based scheme was performed for CFD method, and Variable Hard Sphere (VHS) and diffuse model were employed in DSMC method. Also, as an initial estimation, the local Knudsen number was applied to determine the interface location between the continuum-rarefied regions (r = 0.0855 m). Then it was modified (r = 0.084 m) to reduce the computational cost. The comparison results of pure CFD and CFD-DSMC methods illustrated that there were large differences between the flow... 

A magnetically recyclable vanadium(V) catalyst was synthesized by covalent anchoring of VO(salen)Cl on silica-coated Fe 3O 4 nanoparticles. This straightforward preparation yields magnetically separable Fe 3O 4@SiO 2@VO(salen) nanoparticles with high vanadium loading. These nanoparticles were efficient catalysts for selective oxidation of sulfides to corresponding sulfoxides with urea hydrogen peroxide in excellent yields. Leaching and recycling experiments revealed that the nanocatalyst can be applied for nearly complete oxidation of sulfides for at least five successive cycles  

Let A be an n × m matrix with m > n, and suppose that the underdetermined linear system As = x admits a sparse solution ∥s 0∥o < 1/2spark(A). Such a sparse solution is unique due to a well-known uniqueness theorem. Suppose now that we have somehow a solution ŝ as an estimation of s0, and suppose that ŝ is only "approximately sparse", that is, many of its components are very small and nearly zero, but not mathematically equal to zero. Is such a solution necessarily close to the true sparsest solution? More generally, is it possible to construct an upper bound on the estimation error ∥ŝ - s 0∥2 without knowing s0? The answer is positive, and in this paper, we construct such a bound based on... 

In gas purification using polymeric membrane systems, different parameters affect on product specification. In these systems, pressure ratio, stage-cut, membrane selectivity and feed purity are important parameters which changing in these parameters results in a different product specification. Existence of a mathematical correlation between these parameters can be helpful and it gives a view that shows how can approach to products with desired specification. In present study, a correlation between effective parameters has been developed. This dimensionless mathematical model shows how product purity and recovery are influenced by membrane selectivity (DR; from 2 to 125) and feed purity in... 

Natural gas contains several impurities, e.g., CO 2 and H 2S, which have undesirable effects on the performance of the glassy polymeric membranes. The plasticization effect of H 2S at high concentrations on the gas separation performance of polyphenylene oxide hollow fiber membrane has been studied at different compositions of H 2S and feed pressures. The existence of high concentrations of H 2S in CH 4 feed mixture, which is present in many natural gas sources in Iran, enhances plasticization. For a H 2S/CH 4 mixture containing 5008 ppm H 2S at ≈ 75 psig, the H 2S permeance reduces by > 45% from its initial value. H 2S acts as a plasticizer in H 2S/CH 4 membrane separation at elevated... 

Impurities such as hydrogen sulfide, water vapor and heavy hydrocarbons in natural gas have considerable effects on the membrane performance. Small amounts of condensable and polymer soluble components in the feed gas cause swelling or plasticization of glassy membranes, leading to a reduction in membrane selectivity. In the present research the influence of ethane was investigated on the permeance and selectivity of two commercially available hollow fiber membranes, namely Cardo-type polyimide and PPO hollow fibers for CO 2/CH 4 separations. It was concluded that the gas mixture permeation rate was increased in the presence of C 2H 6. However, the CO 2/CH 4 separation factors remained... 

In this paper, a passive microfluidic device for continuous real time blood plasma separation has been studied and optimized. A numerical model is used to solve both the fluid flow and the particles confined within it. Red blood cells are considered as particles with diameter of 7μm. A parametric study is performed in order to characterize the effect of different parameters on separation and purity efficiency. In this study, four different variables were introduced to design the microfluidic device for blood plasma separation including: the angle between the daughter channels and the main channel, the widths, the diffuse angle and the number of daughter channels. Results show that the... 

The goal of this work is separation and recovery of catalyst residue in wastewater and byproducts of PTA (poly terephetalic acid) unit. Catalyst recovery consists in separating the maximum amount of catalyst and changing the same into valuable compounds. The PTA unit uses cobalt catalyst for oxidation reactions. The byproducts, which contain catalyst, were burned. In the case of metal oxide recovery in the ashes of waste materials, we could solve the problem of the Petrochemical Company. This new method may help us to recover catalyst from wastewater in PTA unit, after which small amounts of ions may be absorbed on a column filled with special absorbent, in such a way that the wastewater... 

On-chip phase separation of multiphase microflows at the divergence point of Y-shaped microfluidic junctions is an effective way for integrating continuous microstructured devices. In this study, flow pattern maps of various solvent pairs based on the volumetric flow rates of both phases have been drawn experimentally and compared with numerical prediction to investigate the effective domain for which complete phase separation occurred. Furthermore, sufficient separation of aqueous and organic phases at the end of the microchannel was achieved by controlling the pressure difference at the liquid-liquid interface via loading back-pressure on the organic phase. A mathematical model based on... 

Two gains play key roles in recently developed MIMO wireless communication systems: "spatial diversity" gain and "spatial multiplexing" gain. The diversity gain refers to the capability to decrease the error rate of the MIMO channel, while the multiplexing gain implicitly refers to the amount of increase in the capacity of the MIMO channel. It has been shown that there is a fundamental tradeoff between these two types of gains, meaning interplay between increasing reliability (via an increase in the diversity gain) and increasing data rate (via an increase in the multiplexing gain). On the other hand, recently, MIMO radars have attracted much attention for their superior ability to enhance... 

Graphene oxide membranes were prepared by vacuum and pressurized ultrafiltration methods on the 12% modified Polyacrylonitrile (12mPAN) substrate to specify challenges, salient features, future directions, and potential of GO membrane for separation fields using characterization techniques and gas separation test (studied gases are CO2, He and N2), which is an efficient tool for better understanding of GO membrane behavior. GO membrane structure was examined over a wide range of parameters, such as pore size range of substrate and its surface properties, pH of GO dispersion, GO content, synthesis pressure, operating pressure and temperature. The results show that the GO content does not hold... 

Protein separation and purification technologies play an essential role in various industries including but not limited to pharmaceuticals, dairy as well as the food sector. Accordingly, a wide variety of techniques such as chromatography and electrophoresis have been developed and utilized extensively over the years for this purpose. Despite their widespread acceptance, conventional techniques still suffer from major limitations and complexities such as short lifetime, low productivity, high-pressure drop and difficulty in scale-up among others. Membrane separation processes have received significant attention in recent years as a promising alternative that can potentially overcome the... 

ZSM-5 (Seolite Sconoy Mobil) aluminosilicate zeolites synthesized by the hydrothermal method were incorporated into the hydrophobic ethyl cellulose (EC) nanofibrous membrane. The performance of synthesized nanofibers was investigated for a gravity driven oil–water separation. The synthesized ZSM-5 nanozeolites and EC/ZSM-5 composite nanofibers were characterized using XRD, FESEM, XPS, FTIR and AFM analysis. The permeability of EC/ZSM-5 5 wt% for oil in water mixture was in order of n-hexane (5170 ± 60 L/m2 h) > n-heptane (4600 ± 50 L/m2 h) > cyclohexane (4350 ± 35 L/m2 h) > pump oil (3780 ± 28 L/m2 h) > lubricating oil (3200 ± 25 L/m2 h) > motor oil (2980 ± 20 L/m2 h) with a separation... 

Separation of particles or cells has various applications in biotechnology, pharmaceutical and chemical industry. Inertial cell separation, in particular, has been gaining a great attention in the recent years since it has exhibited a label-free, high-throughput and efficient performance. In this work, first, an inertial contraction–expansion array microchannel device, capable of passively separating two particles with diameters of 4 and 10 μm, was numerically studied. Then, the validated model was combined with curved geometries in order to investigate the effect of curve features on the separation process. The overall purpose was to investigate the interaction between the two different...