Sharif Digital Repository

In this work, a nanocomposite containing manganese dioxide (MnO2) modified reduced graphene oxide (rGO) supported bimetallic palladium-nickel (Pd-Ni) catalyst is prepared by electrodeposition method. The nanocomposite modifier film is prepared by forming a thin layer of graphene oxide (GO) via drop-casting of GO nanosheet dispersion on glassy carbon electrode (GCE), followed by electrochemical reduction of the film to provide rGO/GCE. Then, a two-step potential procedure is applied to deposit MnO2 nanoparticles on rGO/GCE. At the optimum deposition conditions, MnO2 nanoparticles with a thickness of 30-50 nm homogeneously covered the rGO surface (MnO2/rGO/GCE). Finally, the bimetallic Pd-Ni... 

Increasing energy demands for pollution-free and renewable energy technologies have stimulated intense research on the development of inexpensive, highly efficient, and stable non-noble metal electrocatalysts for oxygen evolution reaction (OER). In this study, a superior OER performance was achieved using a tri-metallic (Zn, Co, Ni) high-performance electrocatalyst. We successfully fabricated a peony-flower-like hierarchical ZnCo2O4 through an additive-free hydrothermal reaction followed by heat treatment. Then NiCo-LDH (layered double hydroxides) nano-flakes was electrodeposited on the ZnCo2O4/GCE surface to prepare NiCo-LDH/ZnCo2O4/GCE which was used as electrode for OER. The structure and... 

Multi-walled carbon nanotubes decorated with Fe 3O 4 nanoparticles (Fe 3O 4NPs/MWCNT) were prepared and used to construct a novel biosensor for the simultaneous detection of adenine and guanine. The direct electro-oxidation of adenine and guanine on the modified electrode were investigated by linear sweep voltammetry. The results indicate a remarkable increase in the oxidation peak currents together with negative shift in the oxidation peak potentials for both adenine and guanine, in comparison to the bare glassy carbon electrode (GCE). The surface morphology and nature of the composite film deposited on GCE were characterized by transmission electron microscopy, atomic force microscopy,... 

Fabrication of scaffolds with enhanced mechanical properties and desirable cellular compatibility is critical for numerous tissue engineering applications. This study was aimed at fabrication and characterization of a nanofiber skin substitute composed of collagen (Col)/sodium alginate (SA)/ polyethylene oxide (PEO)/Rhodotorula mucilaginosa sp. GUMS16 produced exopolysaccharides (EPS) were prepared using the biaxial electrospinning technique. This study used collagen extracted from the bovine tendon as a natural scaffold, sodium alginate as an absorber of excess wound fluids, and GUMS16 produced exopolysaccharides as an antioxidant. Collagen was characterized using FTIR and EDS analyses. The... 

An efficient and commercially available method is introduced for preparation of a binder-free electrode for capacitive deionization (CDI) application. An interconnected porous composite consisting of polyphosphate (PPO), graphene (Gr) and multi-walled carbon nanotube (CNT) is fabricated and assembled on a Ni foam substrate to prepare a binder-free electrode (Ni/PPOGrCNT). The resulting electrodes were characterized using various instrumental techniques such as TEM, SEM, EDS, XRD, FT-IR, Raman, XPS and XRF. Characterization results indicated that a mesoporous PPO structure is formed on a 3D assembly of carbon backbone. Accordingly, the 3-D porous structure facilitates the ion diffusion into... 

The authors regret We have found, there is a problem with the image orders in the last version of the article that is being published online. In the accessible version, the caption of the images are exactly in the true orders, but the images are shifted up and they are not shown in their exact positions. This Corrigendumm is being released for revision of the image orders, like what they were in the accepted version of the manuscript. The materials are shown in the following pages. The authors would like to apologise for any inconvenience caused. [Formula presented] Scheme 1. Binder-free fabrications of the PPOGrCNT on nickel foam (Ni/PPOGrCNT electrode). [Formula presented] Fig. 1. (a)... 

Readily prepared copper nanoparticles supported on CeO2 have been found to effectively catalyse the 1,3-dipolar cycloaddition (CuAAC) of a variety terminal alkynes and organic azides generated in situ from sodium azide and different organic halides furnishing the corresponding 1,2,3-triazoles in excellent yields. Cu nanoparticles supported on CeO2 have been characterized by X-ray diffraction analysis, energy dispersive X-ray analysis, scanning electron microscope and transmission electron microscope. The salient features of the present protocol are shorter reaction time, mild reaction conditions, reusability of the catalyst, and applicability to a wide range of substrates. © 2016 Elsevier... 

The reaction of the functionalized mesoporous SBA-15 in absolute ethanol with copper (II) acetate afforded a novel CuII-Schiff base/SBA-15 catalyst. The compound CuII-Schiff base/SBA-15 was characterized by IR spectroscopy, small-angle X-ray diffraction (SAX), Energy Dispersive X-ray Spectroscopy (EDXS), X-ray Absorption Near Edge Structure (XANES), Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM), Transmission Electron Microscope (TEM), and N2 adsorption/desorption studies. Further, the catalytic activity of this well-defined material was tested in three-component Copper-catalyzed Azide-Alkyne Cycloaddition (CuAAC) reactions to obtain 1,4-disubstituted-1,2,3-triazoles in good to excellent yields from an... 

Fabrication of scaffolds with enhanced mechanical properties and desirable cellular compatibility is critical for numerous tissue engineering applications. This study was aimed at fabrication and characterization of a nanofiber skin substitute composed of collagen (Col)/sodium alginate (SA)/ polyethylene oxide (PEO)/Rhodotorula mucilaginosa sp. GUMS16 produced exopolysaccharides (EPS) were prepared using the biaxial electrospinning technique. This study used collagen extracted from the bovine tendon as a natural scaffold, sodium alginate as an absorber of excess wound fluids, and GUMS16 produced exopolysaccharides as an antioxidant. Collagen was characterized using FTIR and EDS analyses. The... 

The production of porous (SAFFIL) preforms and SAFFIL/SiCP hybrid preforms will be discussed. SAFFIL fibers and SiCP are dispersed into an aqueous medium that consists of colloidal silica binder, distilled water, dispersants and deflocculants using agitation, spontaneous sedimentation, followed by drying and final strengthening. The effect of different process parameters such as various deflocculants and surfactants on the mechanical properties, mixing time and volumetric change of these preforms will also be investigated  

Synthesis of dextran-graft-poly(hydroxyethyl methacrylate) gels as a new fluoride biosorbent was considered in this work. For this propose, the Taguchi experimental design method was used for optimizing the synthetic conditions of the gels to reach high level of fluoride absorbency. The effects of three main parameters including concentrations of monomer (hydroxyethyl methacrylate), crosslinking agent (ethylene glycol dimethacrylate), and initiator (ammonium persulfate) on the final properties of the prepared gels were investigated. The proposed mechanism for grafting and chemically crosslinking reactions was proved with equilibrium water absorption, Fourier-transformed infrared, scanning... 

Deep structures consisting of many layers of nonlinearities have a high potential of expressing complex relations if properly initialized. Autoencoders play a complementary role in training a deep structure by initializing each layer in a greedy unsupervised manner. Due to the high capacity presented by autoencoders, these structures need to be regularized. While mathematical regularizers (based on weight decay, sparsity, etc.) and structural ones (by way of, e.g., denoising and dropout) have been well studied in the literature, quite a few papers have addressed the problem of training autoencoder with non-smooth regularization. In this paper, we address the problem of training autoencoder... 

It has been shown that more accurate signal recovery can be achieved with low-coherence dictionaries in sparse signal processing. In this Letter, the authors extend the low-coherence attribute to receptive fields in convolutional neural networks. A new constrained formulation to train low-coherence convolutional neural network is presented and an efficient algorithm is proposed to train the network. The resulting formulation produces a direct link between the receptive fields of a layer through training procedure that can be used to extract more informative representations from the subsequent layers. Simulation results over three benchmark datasets confirm superiority of the proposed... 

Deep neural networks have presented superlative performance in many machine learning based perception and recognition tasks, where they have even outperformed human precision in some applications. However, it has been found that human perception system is much more robust to adversarial perturbation, as compared to these artificial networks. It has been shown that a deep architecture with a lower Lipschitz constant can generalize better and tolerate higher level of adversarial perturbation. Smooth regularization has been proposed to control the Lipschitz constant of a deep architecture and in this work, we show how a deep convolutional neural network (CNN), based on non-smooth regularization... 

Transformer networks, originally developed in the community of machine translation to eliminate sequential nature of recurrent neural networks, have shown impressive results in other natural language processing and machine vision tasks. Self-attention is the core module behind visual transformers which globally mixes the image information. This module drastically reduces the intrinsic inductive bias imposed by CNNs, such as locality, while encountering insufficient robustness against some adversarial attacks. In this paper we introduce K-sparse attention to preserve low inductive bias, while robustifying transformers against adversarial attacks. We show that standard transformers attend... 

Demand for more efficient energy storage devices stimulates efforts to search and develop new materials and composites with promising properties. In this regard, composite materials, including carbonaceous materials and metal oxides have attracted a great attention due to better electrochemical performance as compared to their single material analogues. For the first time, herein, we report a new and simple procedure for preparing porous highly oriented pyrolytic graphite/nickel hydroxide composite (P-HOPG/Ni(OH)2) via a fast and simple two-step electrochemical method including potentiostatic routes. In the first step, a low anodic potential (2 V) was applied to pristine HOPG in 0.5 M H2SO4... 

A novel voltammetric sensor based on glassy carbon electrode (GCE) modified with a thin film of multi-walled carbon nanotubes (MWCNTs) coated with an electropolymerized layer of tiron-doped polypyrrole was developed and the resulting electrode was applied for the determination of acyclovir (ACV). The surface morphology and property of the modified electrode were characterized by field emission scanning electron microscopy and electrochemical impedance spectroscopy techniques. The electrochemical performance of the modified electrode was investigated by means of linear sweep voltammetry (LSV). The effect of several experimental variables, such as pH of the supporting electrolyte, drop size of... 

A carbon-paste electrode (CPE) modified with iron(II) phthalocyanine was used for the sensitive voltammetric determination of epinephrine (EN). The electrochemical response characteristics of the modified electrode toward EN, ascorbic acid (AA) and uric acid (UA) were investigated by cyclic and differential pulse voltammetry (CV and DPV). The results show an efficient catalytic activity of the electrode for the electro-oxidation of EN, which leads to improvement of reversibility of the electrode response and lowering its overpotential by more than 100 mV. The effect of pH and potential sweep rate on the mechanism of the electrode process was investigated. The modified electrode exhibits an... 

27Al, 17O and 13C chemical shieldings of aluminum acetylacetonate complex, Al(acac)3, were calculated at some Density Functional Theory (DFT) levels of theory. In these calculations the X-ray structures of its different polymorphs were used. Using these calculated data observed discrepancies between the X-ray crystallography and solid state NMR experiment were explained in terms of the quality of the NMR data. In this survey we resorted to the simulated spectra using our calculated chemical shifts. Inorder toconfirm our conclusions, electric field gradient (EFG) tensors of the 27Al and 17O nuclei were calculated at the same levels of theory as used in the chemical shielding calculations. On... 

Cu2O nanocubes, octahedra, spheres and truncated rhombic dodecahedral were prepared and their structural, morphological, and electronic properties were investigated by X-ray diffraction analysis, X-ray absorption near edge structure, scanning electron microscope and transmission electron microscope and X-ray absorption near edge structure. Cu2O nanocrystals were successfully employed to catalyze the 1,3-dipolar cycloaddition reaction for the synthesis of 1,4-disubstituted triazoles. Cu2O nanocubes and octahedral showed the superior catalytic performance in the cycloaddition reaction. These results reveal that crystal-plane engineering of oxide catalysts is a useful strategy for developing...