Sharif Digital Repository

The importance of the issue of laws of nature is obvious so that some say the purpose of science is discovering the laws of nature. In his “laws and symmetry” (1989) van Fraassen takes an antirealistic position toward the laws. His project is to clear science from metaphysics, and since the notion of laws of nature has heavy metaphysical presuppositions it should be eliminated from the literature of science. He tries to provide three kinds of arguments against the notion of laws: first, historical arguments, second, arguing in favor of insufficiency of all presented accounts of laws, and third, rejecting the tasks that accounts of laws should do. In van Frassen’s view, studies of science... 

According to today’s medicine progress, the need for improving the medical facilities have been increased. Within the human body, the biomolecules concentration gradient is regulating the cell functions. Biological processes such as immune response, wound healing, and cancer metastasis have been affected by the bimolecular concentration gradient. So understanding the cell behavior in the presence of a chemical gradient can improve the understanding from these biological processes, and also would help in medical researches. On the other hand, finding the appropriate dose of the drugs and in some cases finding the most effective drug is a clinical challenge that made a new field of research in... 

In this thesis, we introduce a novel Artificial Intelligence (AI) system inspired by the philosophical and psychoanalytical concept of imagination as a ``Re-construction of Experiences". Our AI system is equipped with an imagination-inspired module that bridges the gap between textual inputs and other modalities, enriching the derived information based on previously learned experiences. A unique feature of our system is its ability to formulate independent perceptions of inputs. This leads to unique interpretations of a concept that may differ from human interpretations but are equally valid, a phenomenon we term as ``Interpretable Misunderstanding". We employ large-scale models,... 

The primary objective of this thesis is to provide solutions addressing some security loopholes in continuous variables quantum key distribution protocols. The coherent detection method is utilized in this particular quantum key distribution scheme, which is a phase-sensitive detection. To measure in the quantum noise limit in the detection part, we need a local optical oscillator, which must possess a high intensity and a consistent phase correlation with the quantum signal. Therefore, reconstructing the emitter’s reference phase in the receiver’s detection system is considered as one of the most critical challenges in these protocols. In order to attain this goal, in the early versions of... 

The development of clean, renewable and alternative sources of fossil fuels has increased in recent years due to various factors such as environmental pollution, reduced fossil fuel resources and increased energy consumption. The application of microbial fuel cells is one of the clean energy production methods using renewable sources such as municipal sewage. The microbial fuel cell converts the chemical energy stored in organic materials into electrical energy and simultaneously purifies the sewage. Increasing current density and power density are the most important challenges for microbial fuel cells. In this study, the two biocatalysts of Shewanella Oneidensis MR1 and Escherichia coli... 

Due to the ever-growing applications of video signals in day-to-day life and the large amount of information they contain, the compressing and processing of these signals is vital. In this thesis, a deep neural network called MC-ResNet is proposed which provides an approximation of non-reference frames based on reference ones. Next, three scenarios for compressed video sensing are presented. In all three scenarios, the reference frames are sampled and transmitted independently and reconstructed in the receiver by BCS-SPL method. In the first scenario, the difference between the non-reference frame and the approximation obtained from the MC-ResNet network is sampled and transmitted. In the... 

Numerical Simulation of two-dimensional steady compressible fluid flow on unstructured grids was accomplished using a fast implicit algorithm. To solve the copmlete two-dimensional Navier-Stokes equations, implicit time stepping was used which results in a large sparse linear system in each iteration. To solve the linear system, the biconjugate gradient method which belongs to Krylov subspace methods family, with an ILU(0) preconditioner was used. For accelerating the solution in large problems, parallel processing was used for linear system to be solved faster. Two upwind methods, namely Roe’s and AUSM+ methods were used for spatial descritizaion of inviscid fluxes with a MUSCL algorithm... 

During fuel combustion, aromatic sulfur compounds in energy fuels convert into sulfur oxides, which cause major environmental problems such as acidic rain, global warming, and air pollution. Absorption desulfurization is one of the promising and economical methods to remove these sulfur compounds from fuels. Metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) are a class of nanoporous materials that are of interest for use as adsorbents due to their high specific surface area, unique surface adsorption properties, high adsorption capacity, tunable porosity, flexible dynamic behavior, and diversity in functional and metal groups. In this research, we first synthesized five metal-organic frameworks, namely... 

In this research, molybdenum and tungsten catalysts modified with cobalt and nickel on a carbon support have been synthesized and investigated in the oxidation desulfurization process. A model fuel was used to evaluate the synthesized catalysts. This model fuel was n-decane. dibenzothiophene was also used as a sulfur model. The synthesized catalysts were subjected to various analyzes such as XRD, FTIR, Raman, BET-BJH, NH3-TPD, TEM and ICP-OES for structural evaluation. On the other hand, synthetic parameters such as metal loading rate, molar or weight ratio of secondary metal (cobalt and nickel) to primary metal (molybdenum and tungsten) and molar ratio of citric acid to primary metal as... 

Environmental regulations with respect to the marine diesel emissions have become stricter during recent years, thereby imposing traffic limitations on Iranian ships preventing them to enter emission control areas. Nitrogen oxides (NOx), as one of most important air pollutants, have adverse impacts on public health and ecosystem, so as the ships are the primary source of NOx internationally, the after-treatment system finds more urge to be developed. In this study, a NOx reduction system using non-thermal plasma technology is studied in order to determine its application and efficiency for NOx removal from the exhaust gas of Iranian marine diesel engines. Meanwhile, important factors were...