Sharif Digital Repository

In this research, we investigate a three-stage supply chain with one supplier, several manufacturers and multiple retailers where the supplier provides a common raw material to each manufacturer, who in turn uses a single stage production facility to convert it into final products that are delivered at fixed lot sizes to retailers. An integrated economic procurement, production, and delivery model is developed whose objective is to find the common production cycle length, production sequences of final products at manufacturers and delivery frequencies of final products to retailers minimizing the total costs of considered supply chain. We propose an analytical solution procedure and an... 

Corrosion of lead silicate glass (LSG) contacting 0.5 M aqueous nitric acid (HNO 3) was investigated via scanning electron microscopy, energy-dispersive spectroscopy, inductively coupled plasma analysis, and weight-loss measurement to determine the respective contributions of the ion-exchange vs. the hydrolysis reactions. The LSG having X M ≡ Pb+K+Na/Si mole ratios of less than 0.7 showed very little weight loss with no Si network deterioration. At X M > 0.7, the mechanism changed into the hydrolysis, which caused the formation of a networkless gel layer resting at the solid/liquid interface. Addition of titania (TiO 2) and zirconia (ZrO 2) had disparate effects: X M < 0.7 improved corrosion... 

Interpreting the complex interaction of nanostructured fluid flow with a dipole in a duct, with peripherally uniform temperature distribution, is the main focus of the current work. This paper also sheds light on the changes in the Nusselt number, temperature profiles, and velocity distributions for the fully developed nanofluid flow in a vertical rectangular duct due to a dipole placed near a corner of the duct. A finite volume approach has been incorporated for the numerical study of the problem. It is interesting to note the unusually lower values of the Nusselt number for the higher values of the ratio Gr/Re. Due to the nanostructure in the fluid, an enhancement in the Nusselt number has... 

In this study, a series of highly swelling hydrogels based on sodium alginate (NaAlg) and polymethacrylamide (PMAM) was prepared through free radical polymerization. The graft copolymerization reaction was performed in a homogeneous medium and in the presence of ammonium persulfate (APS) as an initiator andN,N′-methylenebisacrylamide (MBA) as a crosslinker. The crosslinked graft copolymer, alginate-graft-polymethacrylamide (Alg-g-PMAM), was then partially hydrolyzed by NaOH solution to yield a hydrogel, hydrolyzed alginate-graft-polymethacrylamide (H-Alg-g-PMAM). During alkaline hydrolysis, the carboxamide groups of Alg-g-PMAM were converted into hydrophilic carboxylate anions. Either the... 

Hybrid nanoliquids comprise of better physical strength, mechanical resistance, thermal conductivity, and chemical stability as equated to individual nanoliquids. The present work investigates the MHD laminar flow, containing hybrid nanoparticles, with heat transfer phenomenon over a stretching sheet immersed in a porous medium. The effect of induced magnetic field has also been taken into account. The flow model PDEs are rehabilitated into ordinary ones using a persuasive tool of similarity variables. The analogous system of dimensionless equations alongside the boundary conditions is numerically treated with the Successive-Over-Relaxation (SOR) technique. Flow and heat transfer aspects of... 

Communication overhead is one of the major performance bottlenecks in large-scale distributed computing systems, in particular for machine learning applications. Conventionally, compression techniques are used to reduce the load of communication by combining intermediate results of the same computation task as much as possible. Recently, via the development of coded distributed computing (CDC), it has been shown that it is possible to enable coding opportunities across intermediate results of different computation tasks to further reduce the communication load. We propose a new scheme, named compressed coded distributed computing (in short, compressed CDC), which jointly exploits the above... 

Hybrid nanoliquids comprise of better physical strength, mechanical resistance, thermal conductivity, and chemical stability as equated to individual nanoliquids. The present work investigates the MHD laminar flow, containing hybrid nanoparticles, with heat transfer phenomenon over a stretching sheet immersed in a porous medium. The effect of induced magnetic field has also been taken into account. The flow model PDEs are rehabilitated into ordinary ones using a persuasive tool of similarity variables. The analogous system of dimensionless equations alongside the boundary conditions is numerically treated with the Successive-Over-Relaxation (SOR) technique. Flow and heat transfer aspects of... 

In this article, a novel approach based on differential transfer matrix method is proposed for fast analysis and optimization of wideband planar tapered directional couplers. In this method, both even and odd modes can be analyzed independently to obtain overall scattering matrix. The new method accelerates the optimization time considerably in planar structures. An 8.34 dB tapered coupler in the frequency band of 1-12 GHz is designed and optimized in the form of offset stripline structure. The experimental result shows good agreement with theory  

Accelerograms recorded near active faults have some important characteristics that make them different from those recorded in far-fault regions. High-frequency components in acceleration records and long-period velocity pulses are among notable specifications of such ground motions. In this paper, a moving average filtering with appropriate cut-off frequency has been used to decompose the near-fault ground motions into two components having different frequency contents: first, Pulse-Type Record (PTR) that possesses long-period pulses; second, the relatively high-frequency BackGround Record (BGR), which does not include large velocity pulses. Comparing the results with those extracted through... 

Lander-Waterman's coverage bound establishes the total number of reads required to cover the whole genome of size G bases. In fact, their bound is a direct consequence of the well-known solution to the coupon collector's problem which proves that for such genome, the total number of bases to be sequenced should be O(G ln G). Although the result leads to a tight bound, it is based on a tacit assumption that the set of reads are first collected through a sequencing process and then are processed through a computation process, i.e., there are two different machines: one for sequencing and one for processing. In this paper, we present a significant improvement compared to Lander-Waterman's... 

In this effort, an analytical solution is proposed for the large amplitude nonlinear vibrations of doubly clamped carbon nanotube (CNT)-based nano-scale bio-mass sensors. The single walled CNT is modeled as an elastic Euler–Bernoulli nano-scale beam and the size effects are introduced into the mathematical model of the system through Eringen’s nonlocal elastic field theory. The nonlinearity arises due to mid-plane stretching of the bridged CNT, and is accounted for as the von Kármán nonlinearity. The impacts of deposited nano-scale bio-object, its geometrical properties, and its landing position along the longitudinal axis of the CNT-based resonator are considered. The nonlinear equations of... 

In this effort, an analytical solution is proposed for the large amplitude nonlinear vibrations of doubly clamped carbon nanotube (CNT)-based nano-scale bio-mass sensors. The single walled CNT is modeled as an elastic Euler–Bernoulli nano-scale beam and the size effects are introduced into the mathematical model of the system through Eringen’s nonlocal elastic field theory. The nonlinearity arises due to mid-plane stretching of the bridged CNT, and is accounted for as the von Kármán nonlinearity. The impacts of deposited nano-scale bio-object, its geometrical properties, and its landing position along the longitudinal axis of the CNT-based resonator are considered. The nonlinear equations of... 

A nonlocal continuum-based model is derived to simulate the dynamic behavior of bridged carbon nanotube-based nano-scale mass detectors. The carbon nanotube (CNT) is modeled as an elastic Euler-Bernoulli beam considering von-Kármán type geometric nonlinearity. In order to achieve better accuracy in characterization of the CNTs, the geometrical properties of an attached nano-scale particle are introduced into the model by its moment of inertia with respect to the central axis of the beam. The inter-atomic long-range interactions within the structure of the CNT are incorporated into the model using Eringen's nonlocal elastic field theory. In this model, the mass can be deposited along an... 

In this work, we introduce a category of dynamic manipulation processes, namely passive dynamic object manipulation, according to which an object is manipulated passively. Specifically, we study passive dynamic manipulation here. We define the main concept, discuss the challenges, and talk about the future directions. Like other passive robotic systems, there are no actuators in these systems. The object follows a path and travels along it under the effect of its own weight, as well as the interaction force applied by each manipulator on it. We select some simple examples to show the concept. For each example, dynamic equations of motion are derived and the stability of the process is taken... 

In the present work, multiple non existing model order reduction (MOR) techniques for unstable second-order form systems (SOSs) are proposed. For unstable SOSs, continuous-time algebraic Lyapunov equations get unsolvable that halt the reduction process. To avoid this problem, unstable SOS is first decomposed into stable and unstable portions and balanced truncation is applied to the stable part. The obtained reduced order model (ROM) for the stable portion is augmented with the unstable portion to obtain the overall reduced system. It is observed that the second-order structure in ROM for the first technique gets lost as well as augmented unstable dynamics degrade the ROM performance. To... 

In the present work, multiple non existing model order reduction (MOR) techniques for unstable second-order form systems (SOSs) are proposed. For unstable SOSs, continuous-time algebraic Lyapunov equations get unsolvable that halt the reduction process. To avoid this problem, unstable SOS is first decomposed into stable and unstable portions and balanced truncation is applied to the stable part. The obtained reduced order model (ROM) for the stable portion is augmented with the unstable portion to obtain the overall reduced system. It is observed that the second-order structure in ROM for the first technique gets lost as well as augmented unstable dynamics degrade the ROM performance. To... 

Silver nanoparticles (Ag. NPs) have shown a biological activity range, synthesized under different environment-friendly approaches. Ag. NPs were synthesized using aqueous crude extract (ACE) isolated from Plantago lanceolata. The ACE and Ag. NPs were characterized and assessed their biological and antioxidant activities. The existence of nanoparticles (NPs) was confirmed by color shift, atomic force microscopy (AFM), and UV–Vis’s spectroscopy. The FT-IR analysis indicated the association of biomolecules (phenolic acid and flavonoids) to reduce silver (Ag+) ions. The SEM study demonstrated a sphere-shaped and mean size in the range of 30 ± 4 nm. The EDX spectrum revealed that the Ag. NPs were... 

Thermal performance of magnetically driven Casson nanofluid over a nonlinear stretching sheet under the influence of entropy, activation energy and convective boundary conditions was analyzed numerically, employing the quasi-linearization method (QLM). The collective behavior of thermophoretic diffusion and Brownian motion along with special effects of viscous dissipation, thermal radiation, heat generation and joule heating are considered in the energy equation for the flow problem. The addition of nanoparticles helps to stabilize the flowing of a nanofluid and maintain the symmetry of the flowing structure. The governing highly nonlinear coupled differential equations of velocity,... 

We introduce the blind index coding (BIC) problem, in which a single sender communicates distinct messages to multiple users over a shared channel. Each user has partial knowledge of each message as side information. However, unlike classical index coding, in BIC, the sender is uncertain of what side information is available to each user. In particular, the sender only knows the amount of bits in each user's side information but not its content. This problem can arise naturally in caching and wireless networks. In order to blindly exploit side information in the BIC problem, we develop a hybrid coding scheme that XORs uncoded bits of a subset of messages with random combinations of bits from... 

We consider a basic caching system, where a single server with a database of N files (e.g. movies) is connected to a set of K users through a shared bottleneck link. Each user has a local cache memory with a size of M files. The system operates in two phases. a placement phase, where each cache memory is populated up to its size from the database, and a following delivery phase, where each user requests a file from the database, and the server is responsible for delivering the requested contents. The objective is to design the two phases to minimize the load (peak or average) of the bottleneck link. We characterize the rate-memory tradeoff of the above caching system within a factor of...